Abolish the Family!

Is the family the heart or part of a heartless world?

by Johanna Isaacson

Fifth Estate # 414, Fall 2023

a review of
Abolish the Family! by Sophie Lewis. Verso, 2022

Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care by M.E. O’Brien. Pluto Press, 2023

As we all navigate the perilous shoals of capitalist austerity and precarity, many turn to the family as the last reserve of collectivity, care, and survival. For a lucky few, this is enough, but this notion of the “last reserve” is a deep structural problem that leaves too many people vulnerable to abandonment or abuse.

Two recent books, Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family! (Verso Press, 2022) and Michelle O’Brien’s Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) help us understand how the family has been shaped as both a carrot and a stick, disciplining subjects throughout historical phases of capitalism while making care contingent on conformity and the fear of abandonment.

Not only do these books debunk this narrow notion of love, but they help us understand why utopian alternatives such as the ongoing encampments surrounding the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock and against Cop City in Georgia are more promising harbingers of collectivity and care than the traditional family.

Lewis’s “manifesto for care and liberation” foregrounds the fact that family abolition would actually expand rather than shrink the realm of care. She wants us to understand that love and family can be at odds and that the reputedly nurturing family can become a barrier to the support we all crave. The reliance on the family creates the notion that survival is a scarcity, requiring traumatic sacrifice, rather than a limitless resource that should be available to all.

The family can serve as a form of “property love a term Lewis borrows from the Russian revolutionary feminist Alexandra Kollontai, forcing children to conform to its dictates even when the family is dysfunctional, authoritarian, patriarchal, homophobic, or transphobic. Both O’Brien and Lewis build on Kollontai’s theories of love under communism while recognizing that she is a problematic figure. O’Brien identifies most closely with “Communization,” an ultra-left tendency that imagines new social relations built in struggle. However, she came to this position through a background in anarchist politics and acknowledges the importance of anarchist theory and struggle as central to her argument.

While we might feel that the family is our only option and that some families, such as POC and queer varieties, can be promising, Lewis is most drawn to POC and queer theorists who argue that even though some individual families might be nurturing, the family in its idealized form is structured by white, settler, heterosexual, patriarchal values and is always a means of forcing people into the enclosure of privatized care. Because of this, she hopes to draw on alternate forms of collectivity modeled by communities of color rather than the rotten foundations of the family, as we imagine building a new world.

in that spirit, Lewis’s book embraces a utopian tone, looking to emancipatory visions of alternatives to the family by a range of philosophers and social movements. She sees the forms of decolonial reinvention, mothering outside motherhood, and work refusal developed by these theorists as building to her own identification with trans(sexual) radicalism that she shares with M.E O’Brien.

Though trans movements’ hopes for gender and sexual emancipation as well as the everyday politics of protest encampments inspire both writers, they acknowledge that true family abolition is not possible before capitalism is defeated and replaced with a private propertyless society based on mutual aid. In this utopian future, the love that some of us have known in the family would be preserved, but also transformed into something that is unimaginable to those living under the violence and constraints of capitalist sociality.

In Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, M.E. O’Brien makes a similar argument but where Lewis has written a brilliant manifesto, O’Brien organizes her book as a more methodical, though still scintillating and passionate, argument. Beginning with the model of women’s communities in the Oaxaca commune, O’Brien, like Lewis, immediately offers the protest encampment as a utopian model of family abolition, a place where women worked collectively, publicly, and with shared intimacy, “reproducing the insurrection.” Although O’Brien’s ultimate goal is the abolition of gender and gendered spheres of labor, she sees the first step in this journey to reinterpret and deprivatize reproductive labor.

O’Brien begins by outlining the problem with the family as it is, using the example of the crises many families experienced during the Covid lockdown to underscore how families are manipulated to fill in the gaps left by cruelly austere policies.

She also examines a truly horrific publicity photograph that depicts Donald and Melania Trump holding a Latinx baby whose parents were killed in a racist mass shooting as a launching point to explore the racist underside of the idealized white family. George Floyd’s last, heartrending call for his mother serves as a vision of what she calls a “line of flight” from the family as we know it.

Throughout the book, O’Brien acknowledges that our entire framings for love and care are often formed by notions of the family and, especially in communities of color, these visions have inspired collective rebellion. She sees Floyd’s call as a hope for an alternative world where the care we associate with mothering is expanded and lifted from the private sphere and where those who suffer are offered succor instead of punishment.

What if Floyd were surrounded by “salvation, aid and care,” rather than punitive violence? Like Lewis, O’Brien emphasizes over and again that by family abolition she imagines a deep expansion of care as it becomes a decommodified resource, free of patriarchal norms, that would allow us to decouple the desire to give and receive love from alienation and coercion.

In part two of the book, O’Brien provides a richly researched history of family abolition, tracing how the concept evolves as the family’s utility to racial capitalism historically transforms. She looks at how, from capitalism’s inception, workers rebelled against normative family forms, exploring Marx and Engels’ critique of the bourgeois nuclear family as well as the attack on kin relationships under slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow-era enforcement of monogamous heteronormative family forms on Black people.

She offers glimpses of transgressive practices, including sex work, gay sex, trans self-presentation, and resistance to racialized family structures. In proletarian communities these practices had the potential of becoming gateways to class struggle. Through exploring decades of social movements, O’Brien shows that a variety of activist-theorists imagined alternatives to the conventional family that can be built on in the present.

In the book’s final section, O’Brien dares to dream about alternative possibilities to the family form. Like Lewis, O’Brien has been central in developing a new tradition of trans radicalism, and she emphasizes that this futurity would start with freedom from prescribed gender roles and behavior which is so central to the traditional family.

O’Brien is interested in the potential of protest encampments to help us imagine “the communizing of care” but she goes on to imagine what social changes might be possible were we allowed to develop them during sustained mass uprisings and occupations against capitalism. Although Family Abolition does not delve deeply into the gendered relations that have evolved in actually existing protest encampments, elsewhere O’Brien’s speculative fiction offers a vision of what those relations could become with social supports.

She imagines this developing during waves of insurrection against capitalist structures. Ongoing rebellion would enable people to collectively deprivatize public space and goods, caring for each other while setting up expansive protest kitchens, medical services, and alternative uses for infrastructure, farms, and factories.

In this transformed landscape, social reproduction would be generalized and transformed, offering care without coercion. For an elaborated narration of this vision, one could read Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, a stunningly ambitious speculative utopian novel co-written by O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi.

As both O’Brien and Lewis suggest, family abolition is not aimed at simply destroying the family, but transforming it, preserving the love and care that the family promises, while negating the coercion and scarcity that too often becomes its reality. In a deep engagement with both works the reader will discover that all the best aspects of the family are preserved

in family abolition, while the pressures and prejudices inherent to a system reliant on privatized care are dissipated.

Both of these works ask the questions, if the family is our most precious institution, why can’t we prioritize its promise of nurturing and care in every dimension of society? Why does the family have to remain the “heart of a heartless world” when we have the option to transform the world in its entirety into a circulation of “generalized human care and queer love” rather than cold cash and commodities?

Instead of huddling in our fragile, darkened homes, why can’t we emerge and bask in the warmth of a sunlit beloved community?

Johanna Isaacson writes pieces on horror and politics. She is a community college teacher in Modesto, Calif. and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (2022), Common Notions Press, and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016), Repeater Books.

Marx and the Communist Enlightenment

Post on: August 2, 2020
Doug Enaa Greene
Harrison Fluss


Marxism is the completion of the Radical Enlightenment project.



Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI

Marx and Engels were the philosophes of a second Enlightenment.
— Louis Menand
Enlightenment and the Young Marx

For Jonathan Israel, Marx’s status as a Radical Enlightenment figure ended prematurely in 1844. According to this interpretation, Marx was a Spinozistic liberal until he discovered the proletariat and converted to communism.1 But this sharp break that Israel assumes in Marx’s thinking did not occur. Israel provides only a cursory treatment of Marx’s writings after 1844 and never shows how Marx broke with the Enlightenment. This stark division between Enlightenment ideas and communism is arguably the worst part of his latest book, The Enlightenment That Failed. Israel implies that if only Marx had not collaborated with the bad Engels, but had stuck with the liberal Young Hegelians, he would have been saved from the economic “determinism” and “authoritarianism” that marred his later political career. Israel’s case for a counter-Enlightenment Marx ignores how earlier “Spinozistic” concerns and themes were integrated into his theory of communist revolution. Neither the “young Marx” nor the “old Marx” renounced humanism, naturalism, and the progressive ideas of Radical Enlightenment.

Israel mentions Marx’s father, Heinrich, in passing, but he neglects an entire backdrop of Marx’s Enlightenment-influenced childhood. This refers to the impact of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, the privy councillor of Marx’s hometown of Trier and his future father-in-law. It is true that Heinrich Marx was a fan of Voltaire and Rousseau, but he was a fairly moderate liberal; it was in fact Ludwig who introduced the more radical aspects of the French Revolution to Marx, such as the utopian socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon. One other influence Israel ignores is that of Ludwig’s daughter and Marx’s future bride, Jenny von Westphalen. Four years his senior, and sometimes scandalously wearing a French tricolor in her hair, the young Jenny was key to Marx’s political development.2

As Israel notes, in order to practice law, Heinrich was forced to convert from Judaism to Lutheranism. Seven years after the defeat of the Grande Armée, Frederick William III revoked the civil emancipation of Jews that Napoleon had established in Trier. The emancipation of Jewish people was a conquest of the French Revolution, championed by Robespierre and Napoleon alike, and won the admiration of liberal elements in Germany. The revocation of Jewish emancipation affected not only the Marxes but also future associates of Karl such as the Hegelian law professor Eduard Gans and the poet Heinrich Heine. Heinrich Marx, Gans, and Heine were all pressured to civilly renounce Judaism.

After his conversion, Heinrich Marx continued to admire the French Enlightenment, and as a fellow liberal, he befriended Ludwig von Westphalen.3 Together, they were members of the Trier Casino Club, a club of bourgeois professionals with a liberal or left-wing bent. On one particular Bastille Day, the members spontaneously sang “La Marseillaise” in celebration. Little did they know that there was a Prussian spy in their midst, and once word reached the king about this rousing rendition of the subversive anthem, the club was unceremoniously shut down.

Soon after Karl began studying at university, he immersed himself in Hegelian philosophy. Heinrich feared the increasing radicalization of his son and believed that Karl’s path into philosophy would do him little good for his professional career. Once Marx told his father that he discovered Hegel in 1837, Heinrich all but despaired for his son’s prospects. Marx, however, ignored his father and delved deeper into the exciting world of Young Hegelianism.4

The two most important professors whom Marx had at the universities of Berlin and Bonn were Eduard Gans and Bruno Bauer. Gans was one of Hegel’s students, but after the July Revolution of 1830, Gans took Hegelianism in a republican and socialistic direction. Bauer was also a disciple of Hegel’s, and originally belonged to the Hegelian right; he favored orthodox Lutheranism and monarchism. But later, he transformed into a radical republican and a staunch critic of the Bible. Arnold Ruge christened Bauer the “Robespierre” of theology.5 From these teachers, Marx absorbed Hegelian philosophy and democratic republicanism.
Enlightenment and the Young Engels

Growing up in different circumstances, the young Friedrich Engels was raised by strict conservative Pietists. The wealthy Engels family was based in Wuppertal, and his father, Friedrich Sr., owned textile factories as part of the firm Ermen & Engels. Young Friedrich gradually shook off the traditional religious beliefs of his parents and converted to atheistic Hegelianism after reading David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835–36). Strauss was one of the first left Hegelians, combining Hegel’s philosophy with Enlightenment rationalism. He argued that the Gospels were not literal histories but mythopoetic illustrations of the human condition. Jesus was not the son of God but a poetic representation of humanity’s own infinite worth.6

After beginning military service in Berlin, Engels joined forces with the Young Hegelians. He frequented the Hippel café, where Bauer and others would drink and converse. Engels liked to draw funny caricatures of their rowdy philosophical debates,7 and he even wrote a bombastic epic poem about Young Hegelianism, entitled “The Insolently Threatened yet Miraculously Rescued Bible.” There, Engels portrays the Young Hegelians as more dangerous than the Jacobin Club and refers to himself by his new Jacobin alias, Oswald:


Right on the very left, that tall and long-legged stepper
Is Oswald [Engels], coat of grey and trousers shade of pepper;
Pepper inside as well, Oswald the Montagnard;
A radical is he, dyed in the wool, and hard.
Day in, day out, he plays upon the guillotine a
Single solitary tune and that’s a cavatina,
The same old devil-song; he bellows the refrain:
Formez vos bataillons! Aux armes, citoyens!
[Form your battalions! To arms, citizens! — from the Marseillaise]8

Marx knew Engels in 1842 but did not think much of him at the time. Two years later, however, when they reencountered each other in Paris, they recognized that they shared the same fundamental worldview and thus began a lifelong friendship and collaboration as communists. Engels was the first to accept communism through the work of Moses Hess. From his experiences with the Parisian working class and after reading Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1843), Marx embraced communism in turn. In another essay written in the same year, Engels deduces socialism as the logical result of British economics, the French Revolution, and German philosophy:


The English came to the [socialist] conclusion practically, by the rapid increase of misery, demoralisation, and pauperism in their own country: the French politically, by first asking for political liberty and equality; and, finding this insufficient, joining social liberty, and social equality to their political claims: the Germans became Communists philosophically, by reasoning upon first principles. This being the origin of Socialism in the three countries.9

Marx repeats this European trinity of British economics, French politics, and German philosophy in his writings from 1844: “It must be granted that the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat just as the English proletariat is its economist and the French its politician.”10 With this new communist worldview, Marx and Engels attempted to settle their philosophical debts with the Young Hegelians. In doing so, they took up the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, which combined materialism, empiricism, and humanism.
The Holy Family

Making their Feuerbachian debut together in The Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels saw Feuerbach’s materialism as repeating the Enlightenment’s battle against metaphysical abstractions. As Hegel put it in The Phenomenology, Enlightenment liberated itself from any metaphysical rationalism, emphasizing what’s finite and concrete over what’s theological and abstract. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels saw Hegel himself as the German repetition of 17th-century rationalism (e.g., Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche), while Feuerbach represented the return to the Enlightenment of Holbach, Helvétius, and Bentham. According to Marx and Engels, Feuerbach had finally exorcised the ghost of metaphysics once and for all, and now all philosophy had to go through the “fire bath” of Feuerbach. As Marx put it once earlier, “There is no other road for you to truth and freedom except that leading through the brook of fire (the Feuerbach). Feuerbach is the purgatory of the present times.”11

But even in their criticism of Spinoza as a rationalist metaphysician, Marx and Engels maintained a materialist basis. In The Holy Family, they affirm a materialist monism, that “body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same [material] reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world.”12 But, in contrast to Bauer and to Israel, Marx and Engels in The Holy Family trace the impact of John Locke’s empiricism on French materialism. It is true, as Israel has pointed out, that Spinozism was an important philosophical component of the Radical Enlightenment; nevertheless, Lockean epistemology had radical implications for philosophers on the Continent as well.13

The Holy Family criticizes the elitism of the Young Hegelians, where Bauer merely echoes the unhistorical conception of human progress that pits a disembodied reason against the spirit of reaction. For Marx, progress advances from social contradictions, and the masses themselves are the bearers of this progress. The masses are the most important factor in Enlightenment, and this process of Enlightenment is inseparable from class struggle.14 The question of the masses is central to Marx and Engels’ critique of Bauer. Bauer saw philosophical criticism as a task directed against the ignorant masses; for him, the lofty fight for self-consciousness and liberty was antagonistic to the crude material interests of the crowd. As one reviewer of The Holy Family wrote, satirizing Bauer’s own elitism, “To get rid of the French Revolution, communism, and Feuerbach, he [Bruno Bauer] shrieks “masses, masses, masses!,” and again: “masses, masses, masses!”15

For Marx and Engels, the two main sources of French materialism were Lockean epistemology and Cartesian natural science. “The two trends intersect in the course of development,” giving birth to the more refined and sophisticated materialism of Holbach and Helvétius. This materialism, however, contains a dialectic within itself, one that points beyond bourgeois society. From the philosophical claims of materialism, the authors deduce the political conclusion of communism. It is worth quoting The Holy Family at length here, since Israel argues that Marx stopped his association with Radical Enlightenment in 1844. But in 1845, Marx and Engels assert the contrary:


French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism. There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.16

Here, Marx and Engels take up key Enlightenment tenets, including the essential goodness of human nature (i.e., the rejection of original sin); the importance of education and environment; the “great significance” of industry; and hedonistic ethics, or what they call “the justification of enjoyment.” These are the principles that any socialism must defend for it to make philosophical sense. Again, Israel’s stark demarcation between Enlightenment and Marx’s communism is belied by such passages.

Without the backbone of these Radical Enlightenment premises, the struggle for social equality would be meaningless. Marx and Engels affirm equality as,


man’s consciousness of himself in the element of practice, i.e., therefore, man’s consciousness of other men as his equals and man’s relation to other men as his equals. Equality is the French expression for the unity of human essence, for man’s consciousness of his species and his attitude toward his species, for the practical identity of man with man, i.e., for the social or human relation of man to man.17

In other words, equality is the social expression of our common human identity. It serves as the basis for criticizing the dehumanizing economic relations that pit human beings against each other.
The German Ideology

In The German Ideology (1845-6), written shortly after The Holy Family, Marx and Engels criticize Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialist, since he, like the French materialists before him, was an idealist when it came to history. In this domain, Feuerbach still privileges ideas over material reality. The German Ideology is where the authors first clearly articulate the materialistic conception of history, which is marked by a series of different modes of production. The products of consciousness such as law, religion, and philosophy are all conditioned by material circumstances. Such a theory of history in particular explains how French materialism is a necessary outgrowth of the bourgeoisie’s struggles against feudalism.18

The German Ideology acknowledges what Hegel had already discovered in The Phenomenology: that the spirit of Enlightenment came about through emerging bourgeois conditions. The truth of Enlightenment was “utility,” and utilitarianism was the philosophy of the radical French bourgeoisie. Before the consolidation of capitalism, philosophers like Holbach and Helvétius did not carefully distinguish human flourishing from economic competition and exploitation. Bourgeois reality was assumed to be the natural order of things. According to Marx, this idealized conception was a necessary and justified illusion, without which there would be no ideological motivation for the bourgeois revolution. But there is a darker side to bourgeois Enlightenment, of what Hegel called “the spiritual animal kingdom.” Beneath the idealistic image of human flourishing lurked the dehumanized relations of commodity exchange.

In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels extracted the communist kernel from the shell of bourgeois Enlightenment, meaning a transition from Helvétius and Holbach to the utopian socialism of Gracchus Babeuf and Charles Fourier. Here, in The German Ideology, the authors focus on the illusion of bourgeois Enlightenment, which could not fulfill the promise of human flourishing. While Helvétius and Holbach represent the bourgeoisie in its heroic and more universal phase, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill represent the philosophical conscience of a cynical bourgeoisie that has resigned itself to the reality of exploitation. For the latter, human flourishing is fully identified with market relations.
The Communist Manifesto

Nonetheless, as jaded as bourgeois Enlightenment can be, there is something refreshing about its rejection of feudalism. Repeating what Hegel argued in The Phenomenology, Marx and Engels see bourgeois reality as achieving a relative kind of Enlightenment. As Marx and Engels put it famously in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”19 The enlightened bourgeoisie “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”20 This description of feudal culture’s demise was strongly foreshadowed in the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its discussion of Rameau’s Nephew.21

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels not only praise the bourgeoisie for uniting the world economy; they also acknowledge the democratic “representative state” as its most important political achievement. Not just the (partial) liberation of the productive forces, but liberal ideas like freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and freedom of the press are legitimate gains for humanity. Political equality, however, is insufficient without economic equality. The bourgeoisie achieved Enlightenment only halfway since it clings to a superstitious belief in private property. Thus the bourgeoisie cannot complete its own Enlightenment, since a truly human and secular society is incompatible with class relations.22

In the third chapter of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels attack what they call feudal socialism and “true socialism.” Both of these false socialisms are reactionary, insofar as they advocate romantic solutions to capitalism. The feudal socialist wants workers to return to an imagined organic aristocratic society, in which they will resubmit to their noble betters. On the other hand, the “true socialist” wants to push aside class struggle in favor of a classless humanitarianism. Such ethical idealism denounces bourgeois society in toto as sinful and irredeemable. While the “true socialists” think they are moving past bourgeois society, they inadvertently adopt the romantic critique of capitalism. For Marx and Engels, one cannot achieve socialism without presupposing the accomplishments of bourgeois society and bourgeois enlightenment.

True socialism “forgot, in the nick of time, that the French [socialist] criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.”23 In their absolute rejection of everything progressive in bourgeois society, including constitutional law, true socialism gives aid to reaction. Presupposing the advancement of science and industry, socialism not only liberates the productive forces; it also consummates the struggle for democracy. Socialism does not simply cast off the forms of democracy and republicanism, but makes democracy real for the working class.
The Dead Dogs

As Marx matured in his economic thinking, he returned to Hegelian dialectics as the basis for his critique of capitalism. In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, he accuses Feuerbach, along with the rest of the German intelligentsia, of treating Hegel like a “dead dog.”24 According to Marx, one must extract the rational side of Hegel’s dialectics and discard its irrational idealism. It is no coincidence that when Marx defends Hegel in his afterword to the first volume of Capital (1867), he compares Hegel’s fate with that of Spinoza’s. If the German Enlightenment stunted itself in treating Spinoza as a “dead dog,” then the same goes for Eugen Dühring and others when they treat Hegel as a mere mystic.25

Marx’s approach to Spinoza and Hegel is itself dialectical. As he puts it in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, “Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.”26

Spinoza is not absent in Marx’s Grundrisse (1859) and Capital. Marx wrote his critique as a “natural history,” wherein he laid bare the economic law of motion for the capitalist system. This presupposes a Spinozistic outlook of paying attention to rational causes over mere appearances: “Vulgar economy which, indeed, ‘has really learnt nothing,’ here as everywhere sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, [political economy] believes that ‘ignorance is a sufficient reason.’” 27 Not only does Marx assume Spinoza’s materialism of causation; like Hegel, he also accepts Spinoza’s insight that all determination is negation; that it is not enough to negate something, but to overcome that negation in turn. Negation is determined not just by particular things, but by an overall process, or what Marx refers to as “the negation of the negation.” For Marx, Spinoza provides the philosophical basis for this dialectical logic: “This identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza’s thesis: determinatio est negatio.”28 Needless to say, this reemergence of Spinozism as integral to Marx’s critique refutes Israel’s argument that the later Marx abandoned Spinozism.
Marx and Engels’ Second Enlightenment

In the Grundrisse, Marx takes issue with bourgeois socialists, who merely affirm the ideals of the French Revolution, while ignoring the realities of capitalism. In pursuing liberty, equality, and fraternity one-sidedly, these socialists ironically reinforce unfreedom, inequality, and atomization. This is because they do not understand the reality of competition and exchange, and fall prey to its logic. This is certainly the case for Marx when he discusses the petty bourgeois socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his followers.29 As Marx puts it in Capital, “There alone rule [in bourgeois society] Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham,” where the name of Bentham signifies the crass logic of exploitation.30

Seemingly strange bedfellows, both Israel and the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser claim that the later Marx abandoned his original humanism. But the evidence in the mature economic manuscripts is clear. Marx reaffirms that socialism will be a realm of freedom based on an advanced material economic base. The realm of necessity will not be abolished but workers will “rationally” regulate “their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.”31 The realm of freedom will “blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”32 In socialism, humanity will live “under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature.”33

The interrelation between humanity and nature, a Spinozistic point, is an echo of what Marx and Engels previously wrote decades before in The Holy Family: “If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of separate individuals but by the power of society. This and similar propositions are to be found almost literally even in the oldest French materialists.”34 These passages from The Holy Family and Capital show continuity in Marx’s Enlightenment humanism.

In his separate works, Engels celebrates the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Diderot and Rousseau are credited for inventing modern dialectics in their respective criticisms of bourgeois society and property relations. But the entirety of the French Enlightenment comes in for special praise in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886): “The French materialists no less than the deists Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction [of historical progress] to an almost fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice’ — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot, for instance.”35

In Anti-Dühring (1877), Engels calls Spinoza “a dialectician,” and in Dialectics of Nature (1883), he affirms Spinoza’s idea of a self-caused substance as expressing the activity of matter in motion, that is, as anticipating dialectical materialism. 36 In an anecdote, Plekhanov recounts how Engels told him that “old Spinoza” was “absolutely right” to see mind and matter as two sides of one nature. In contrast to Israel, Plekhanov unequivocally states, “I am fully convinced that Marx and Engels, after the materialist turn in their development, never abandoned the standpoint of Spinoza.”37

According to Engels, it was the radical bourgeoisie that originally developed the modern idea of equality. This idea was “first formulated by Rousseau, in trenchant terms but still on behalf of all humanity.”38 The emerging proletariat, however, went deeper than the bourgeoisie in adopting equality under its revolutionary banner, and as “was the case with all demands of the bourgeoisie, so here too the proletariat cast a fateful shadow beside it and drew its own conclusions (Babeuf). This connection between bourgeois equality and the proletariat’s drawing of conclusions should be developed in greater detail.”39 Hence, we see that proletarian morality for Engels is not the total negation of bourgeois Enlightenment morality, but its dialectical negation. Political equality is insufficient and needs social equality to be made substantive and permanent.
The Critique of the Gotha Program

This leads us to Marx’s conception of equality in The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Under the banner of social equality, the proletariat establishes its rule. But, according to Marx, during the first phase of communism (i.e., socialism), the right to equality still presupposes inequality. How is this possible? In this initial stage, the productive forces still need to be reorganized and further developed. Socialism frees society from the domination of what Marx called “the law of value” (i.e., commodity relations), but it cannot totally do away with principles of exchange. For the sake of developing the productive forces, the first phase of communism is governed by the principle from each according to their ability, to each according to their deed. This means that “as far as the distribution of [the means of consumption] among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form…The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.”40

Under this first phase of communism, it does not recognize class differences, but it does recognize differences when it comes to what workers can contribute. Some workers, either physically or mentally, will contribute more than others, and they may need more compensation than others because of their particular circumstances. Perhaps they have to take care of more dependents, or they have a greater skill set. Regardless, Marx is clear that a kind of exchange still exists under socialism.

Only in the upper stage of socialism, namely communism proper, does exchange value completely wither away in favor of use value. Hegel had already seen the contradictory nature of value in his analysis of the bourgeois Enlightenment. The truth of bourgeois Enlightenment for Hegel was utility, a contradictory phenomenon that expressed both the promise of human flourishing and the reality of exploitation. Utility was bound up with the commodity form, in which use-value is dominated by market exchange. But for Marx, only full communism can liberate use value from exchange value, thus resolving the main contradiction of bourgeois Enlightenment. Thus, communism is not the abstract negation, but the completion of the Enlightenment project. This completion is summed up in the slogan: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!”41

Under communism, equality is understood as a law of proportion — that all human beings have a right to equal development and satisfaction of their different needs. Helen Macfarlane, the Chartist radical and first translator of The Communist Manifesto into English, put it as follows: “The Rights of one human being are precisely the same as the Rights of another human being, in virtue of their common nature.”42 Without this common human nature, Marx’s slogan for the realization of human wants is unintelligible and unachievable. This slogan is at one with Macfarlane’s translation of the Manifesto’s statement that the “old Bourgeois Society, with its classes, and class antagonisms, will be replaced by an association, wherein the free development of EACH is the free development of ALL.”43

Whether it is Spinozism, French materialism, or the ideas of the French Revolution — particularly the idea of equality — Marx and Engels were no strangers to Radical Enlightenment. On the contrary, they were its most advanced representatives. We have demonstrated that Radical Enlightenment was not just a passing phase of Marx’s youth but the consistent philosophical thread throughout his thinking.

Part V of this series on the Enlightenment will appear next Sunday.


Notes

1. ↑ “Marx’s early thought, shaped by Bauer and Feuerbach, was in a sense a variant of Spinozist materialism, naturalism, anti-providentialism, and anti-Scriptualism which, before long, became dramatically infused with zeal for democratic transformation.” Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment that Failed, 905.



This ignores Bauer’s explicit anti-Spinozism, which favored self-consciousness over substance, as well as Feuerbach’s empiricist critique of Spinoza as a metaphysician. Marx himself in his dissertation repeats Bauer-like criticisms of Spinoza, while in later works, such as The Holy Family, he repeats Feuerbach’s critique. Israel does not deign to comment on Marx’s criticisms of Spinoza in this early period.
2. ↑ Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller, “Subversive Beginnings,” Jacobin, June 19, 2016; Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller, “The Life of Jenny Marx,” Jacobin, February 14, 2016.
3. ↑ For more on Heinrich Marx’s opinions on the French Revolution and Napoleon, see Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work, vol. 1: 1818–1841 (New York: Monthly Review, 2019), 81–82.
4. ↑ The young Marx was into dueling, drinking, and, now, Hegel. In Berlin, a group of Young Hegelians met at Hippel’s café, calling themselves the Berlin Frei. There they drank and vigorously argued, celebrating not just free thought but free spirits. When the future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin visited Berlin in its Young Hegelian heyday, he liked to play a philosophical drinking game:




In Russia, the young Bakunin became a member of a literary group so intoxicated with Hegelian idealism that even their love affairs were permeated by it, and who, volatilizing in the Russian way the portentous abstractions of the German, used to toast the Hegelian categories, proceeding through the metaphysical progression from Pure Existence to the divine Idea.

Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), 262.
5. ↑ David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103.
6. ↑ Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of the Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Friedrich Engels, Letters of the Young Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).
7. ↑ For Engels’s drawings, see “Die Freien by Friedrich Engels,” Wikipedia Commons.
8. ↑ “The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible,” in MECW, vol. 2, 335.
9. ↑ “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” in MECW, vo. 3, 392–93.
Later in the same article, the young Engels inferred that the premises of German philosophy lead to the conclusion of communism:




Our party has to prove that either all the philosophical efforts of the German nation, from Kant to Hegel, have been useless — worse than useless; or, that they must end in Communism; that the Germans must either reject their great philosophers, whose names they hold up as the glory of their nation, or that they must adopt Communism. (Ibid., 406.)

Lenin also popularized Marxism as a synthesis of British economics, French politics, and German philosophy:


The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. (“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” 1913, in Lenin Collected Works [henceforth LCW], vol. 19 [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974], 23–24.)

Before Marx and Engels, Hess was the first to conceive of this progressive trinity of England, France, and Germany in his European Triarchy (1841), wherein he claimed that Spinoza represents “the ideal foundation of modern times.” Four years before he wrote this work, Hess had announced in The Holy History of Mankind (1837) that humanity had entered into the Age of Spinoza.
10. ↑ “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” in MECW, vol. 3, 202.
11. ↑ Karl Marx, “Luther as the Arbiter between Strauss and Feuerbach,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 95.
12. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 129.



The relationship between Feuerbach and Spinoza is unfortunately outside the scope of this series. The scholar Marx W. Wartofsky, however, explains that Feuerbach saw himself as a legatee of Spinoza’s pantheism and materialism: “Thus, Feuerbach contrasts pantheism, as the theoretical negation of theology, with empiricism, as the practical negation of theology. But he says pantheism — that is, Spinoza’s pantheism, which accords matter divine status, albeit abstractly and metaphysically — as the legitimation and sanction of the “materialistic tendency of modern times.’” Feuerbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 370.
13. ↑ Joseph de Maistre, in his St. Petersburg Dialogues, engages in a long rant against Lockeanism. In the sixth dialogue, by denying the doctrine of innate ideas, Locke is called an enemy of Christian authority, and Maistre despairs that so many French philosophers fell under Locke’s spell. They neglected their own “Christian Plato” (Malebranche) in favor of English empiricism. Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 187, 188.
14. ↑ According to Lukács, during the Restoration period, defenders of human progress redefined Enlightenment as inextricably bound up with mass struggle:




According to the new interpretation the reasonableness of human progress develops ever increasingly out of the inner conflict of social forces in history itself; according to this interpretation history itself is the bearer and realizer of human progress. The most important thing here is the increasing historical awareness of the decisive role played in human progress by the struggle of classes in history. The new spirit of historical writing, which is most clearly visible in the important French historians of the Restoration period, concentrates precisely on this question: on showing historically how modem bourgeois society arose out of the class struggles between nobility and bourgeoisie, out of class struggles which raged throughout the entire ‘idyllic Middle Ages’ and whose last decisive stage was the great French Revolution. These ideas produce the first attempt at a rational periodization of history, an attempt to comprehend the historical nature and origins of the present rationally and scientifically.

(Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 27–28.)
15. ↑ Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 22.
16. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, 130.
17. ↑ Ibid., 39.
18. ↑ The German Ideology is frequently described as a work that treats philosophy as a mere epiphenomenon of material class relations, or as simply bourgeois mysticism. But in their polemic against Max Stirner, Marx and Engels defend certain philosophers for their progressive contributions to humanity. This includes praise for the Stoic tradition and for Epicurus as a radical Enlightener: “Epicurus…was the true radical Enlightener of antiquity; he openly attacked the ancient religion, and it was from him, too, that the atheism of the Romans, insofar as it existed, was derived. For this reason, too, Lucretius praised Epicurus as the hero who was the first to overthrow the gods and trample religion underfoot.” The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. 5, 141–42. As we can see, Israel even ignores Marx’s own use of the phrase radical Enlightenment.
19. ↑ Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MECW, vol. 6, 487.
20. ↑ Ibid.
21. ↑ For Hegel’s discussion of Diderot, see Hegel, Enlightenment, and Revolution.
22. ↑ In On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx pointed out that abstract rights to property and religion presupposed an unequal and alienated society. Any society in which private property and religion predominate, such as in the United States, is not a truly humanized one, but still alienated. While political emancipation is certainly an achievement, it is not enough if it stays at the political level and ignores the so-called private realm of civil society. Thus, the problem is not that American society is secular, but since it rests on an alienated bourgeois reality, it is not secular enough. See “On the Jewish Question,” in MECW, vol. 3, 146–47.
23. ↑ Manifesto, 512.



Around the time of the Manifesto, Marx also wrote,


The workers know that the abolition of bourgeois property relations is not brought about by preserving those of feudalism. They know that the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal estates and the absolute monarchy can only accelerate their own revolutionary movement. They know that their own struggle against the bourgeoisie can only dawn with the day when the bourgeoisie is victorious. Despite all this they do not share Herr Heinzen’s bourgeois illusions. They can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers’ revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal.

(“Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality,” in MECW, vol. 6, 332–33.)

We will address how Marx changes his position on the proletariat’s relationship to bourgeois revolutions in part six of this series. Suffice it to say, following the failure of the bourgeoisie to lead revolutions on the Continent in 1848, Marx argues that the proletariat cannot simply wait for the bourgeoisie to fulfill its original democratic tasks. By the 1840s, the heroic phase of bourgeois revolutions was over, and the proletariat must now play the leading revolutionary role; it must fight not only for the older tasks of democracy, but for socialism. Hence, after the failed struggles of 1848, Marx disavows a stagist conception of revolution, committing himself to a politics of permanent revolution. On the history and politics of permanent revolution, see Neil Davidson’s How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?

It is interesting to note that Davidson himself uses the phrase “radicalized Enlightenment” to describe Marx and Engels’s socialist transformation of the bourgeois Enlightenment in the Manifesto: “From these doubts [about bourgeois society] came the radicalized Enlightenment at the heart of Marxism.” Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 655.
24. ↑ “Marx to Kugelmann. 27 June 1870,” in MECW, vol. 43, 528.
25. ↑ In the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx said,




The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

(Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 19.)
26. ↑ “Marx to Lassalle. 31 May 1858,” in MECW, vol. 40, 316.
27. ↑ Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 311.
28. ↑ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 90.
29. ↑ Ibid., 248.
30. ↑ Capital, vol. 1, in MECW, vol. 35, 186. In a footnote to Capital, Marx contrasts Bentham — that “genius of bourgeois stupidity” — unfavorably with the more sophisticated French materialists. Marx does not dismiss the category of utility but argues that one cannot derive an adequate conception of human nature from utility alone: “The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” Ibid., 605.
31. ↑ Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, in MECW, vol. 37, 807.
32. ↑ Ibid.
33. ↑ Ibid.
34. ↑ The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, “131.
35. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in MECW, vol. 26, 373.
36. ↑ “Reciprocal action is the first thing that we encounter when we consider matter in motion as a whole from the standpoint of modern natural science. We see a series of forms of motion, mechanical motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical compound and decomposition, transitions of states of aggregation, organic life, all of which, if at present we still make an exception of organic life, pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect, the sum-total of the motion in all its changing forms remaining the same (Spinoza: substance is causa sui strikingly expresses the reciprocal action).” The Dialectics of Nature. Fragments and Notes, in MECW, vol. 25, 511.
37. ↑ Georgi Plekhanov, “Bernstein and Materialism,” Marxists Internet Archive.
38. ↑ “Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring,” in MECW, vol. 25, 603.
39. ↑ Ibid.
40. ↑ Critique of the Gotha Programme, in MECW, vol. 24, 86.
41. ↑ Ibid., 87. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the phrase “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!” was originally a Saint-Simonian one. Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, 29–30.



While Saint-Simon himself eschewed the Jacobin Terror, he defended the achievements of the French Revolution, and his conception of history and utopian socialism built on Enlightenment ideas. According to the Marxist historian Samuel Bernstein, “Saint-Simon set himself the objective of founding the science of man. He desired to follow in the tradition of Newton, and he conceived of science as organized and directed toward the improvement of mankind. Equally with other great Utopians, he looked to those in power for the fulfillment of his dream.” Samuel Bernstein, “Saint-Simon’s Philosophy of History,” Science & Society 12, no. 1 (Winter 1948): 85.

In Louis Blanc’s speech of 1848 (“A Community of Labor”), we find an early popularization of the slogan that Marx would adopt. The French reformist said, “The ideal toward which humanity must proceed is the following: to produce according to its powers, to consume according to its needs” [authors’ translation]. The original French reads, “L’idéal vers lequel la société doit se mettre en marche est donc celui-ci: produire selon ses forces, consommer selon ses besoins.” Louis Blanc, Pages d’histoire de la Révolution de Février, 1848 (Paris: Imprimerie et Librairie de V Wouters, 1850), 217.
42. ↑ Helen Macfarlane, Red Republican (London: Unkant Press, 2014), 66–67.
43. ↑ Ibid., 139.


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Tags: History

Against Left Pronatalism

Social Democracy Won’t Defeat Capitalism Or Patriarchy

Sunday 9 March 2025, by Robin Peterson


Neoliberalism enforces family responsibility with a cruel logic: a couple who can’t afford rent without both their incomes are a couple who stick together. A young adult who can’t afford college without student loans is a child who remains bound to her parent. Lack of public spending on public goods forces poor and working-class people into economic dependence on their relatives. Meanwhile, for the rich, the private family is reinforced as a main conduit for wealth transmission.

Dustin Guastella is worried about birth rates. In a recent essay titled “In Pursuit of the Family,” this former national DSA leader argues that the nation is in decline, which can only be reversed by its citizens reproducing. [1] The convergence between Guastella and the US paleoconservative right, represented today by figures like Vice President JD Vance and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, is noteworthy. For those familiar with Guastella’s writing, particularly over the last five years, this may be unsurprising: he’s one of the loudest voices and bluntest thinkers of the right flank of the social-democratic left, and has long favored lopping off the “fringe” antioppression parts of the left’s platform. Guastella’s newly proclaimed pronatalism is of interest, first, because he is part of an increasingly influential tendency on the US left and, second, because the pronatalist right now holds decisive political power. [2]

Guastella argues that the US left should advocate raising the national birth rate—that is, increasing the number of babies born to native-born citizens. He sees this as a way to address both economic concerns (such as the Social Security funding cliff) and social ones (such as loneliness among the elderly). In a neat elision of women’s role in reproduction that he maintains throughout the piece, Guastella states that families provide babies. Moreover, he maintains that encouraging family formation is the best way to teach altruism. Guastella reasons that we ought to pass social-democratic policies because they are profamily (and prosocial). Conversely, the virtuous family spirit will be conducive to achieving social democracy, since unions and other mass organizations are best built by altruistic individuals.

We’ve been hearing something similar from the new vice president. As Vance said in a speech at the 2025 March for Life, “We failed a generation, not only by permitting a culture of abortion on demand, but also by neglecting to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to lead a happy and meaningful life…It is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids.” One can hear Vance positioning himself in “opposition” to neoliberalism in his reference to the government’s failure to encourage nuclear family life. This break is not new: there have been aspects of it in Trump’s protectionist stances, for example. Trump’s politics owe something to 1990s Republican contender and paleoconservative standard bearer Pat Buchanan. Vance’s have an even greater affinity to the right’s paleoconservative wing; he leans hard into pronatalism (also a signature issue for Buchanan). But although newly empowered paleoconservatives like Vance and Kevin Roberts talk about investment in parents (and in other things like national infrastructure), their intention is to invest only in a particular family form, and it won’t go any way toward making society more free and equal. [3]

Guastella sounds like JD Vance Lite. This isn’t necessarily his intention. A Millennial on the Bernie-adjacent left could end up at economic nationalism and social conservatism if they simply stopped their ears to the anti-oppression demands of liberation movements. While the work of feminists, welfare-rights militants, antiwar activists, and many other movements that flowered in the 1960s and 70s is still crucial to the progressive left today, the transformative potential of these groups’ critiques—among whose targets were the family and the nation—won’t be fulfilled automatically. The first step is to listen to them. Valuing these antioppression demands is precisely what Guastella argues against.

Although Guastella writes as though to a gender-neutral audience, his proposal for family promotion has far greater consequences for women—who, after all, are the ones who “provide” babies and are (still) largely the ones who care for them. Guastella never mentions the ongoing struggle against the denial of women’s reproductive rights. His omissions are convenient: the ugly, coercive side of a pronatalist state is best left out of the picture, because if we don’t all agree that women’s interest is in having a family, his whole economic plan for the nation falls apart. There is no clear method for reversing birth rate trends in developed countries and the notion that a society with a below-replacement-level birth rate is a society on the decline, are ideological claims that we should not accept. What is certain is that a society in which women have reproductive and sexual freedom will only be achieved by disrupting the current and longstanding social order.

Trying to recreate midcentury social democracy, as Guastella wants the left to do, won’t help defeat either capitalism or patriarchy. Guastella’s familialism and nationalism is in fact symptomatic of a conservative, “tradition”-preserving tendency within capitalism itself, which needs this type of institution. Redistribution of wealth among families (at least, according to a certain standard of what constitutes a legitimate family), leaves the family’s key function intact: to pass down wealth, to reproduce class (and race and gender inequality). Social democracy need not get in the way of capitalism: a little social protection from market forces for those with: “a stake in the future of our country,” as Vance frames it, may even help capitalism continue to reproduce itself.

In this political moment, the progressive left should not back off its ambitions, or sell out its most vulnerable members, but should at every turn seek to present alternatives to both the increasingly bankrupt liberal order and a vindictive far right bent on reversing all efforts to eliminate traditional hierarchies. The major divisions among the working class, including race and gender, are the ones we should focus on bridging.

Because Guastella’s views overlap with those of the party in power as well as a growing portion of the liberal-centrist left, it is useful to understand his analytical failures as well as the points at which he abandons commitments to the liberation of oppressed groups. Below, I will deconstruct Guastella’s claim that the family is an antidote to individualism and neoliberal market logic—two things he collapses into one. Firstly, to elevate the family as against individualism takes liberal ideology at face value. A little inquiry reveals that the original framework of liberalism overlooks the situation of women: the very idea of the autonomous individual is premised on women’s denial of autonomy (via women’s attachment to the family). Second, I will turn to Guastella’s other attempt to oppose family values to something the left agrees is bad: the unfettered market forces of neoliberalism. Once again we find that his reliance on the most basic conventional wisdom has led him astray: as left theorist Melinda Cooper has shown, family responsibility is a constitutive goal of neoliberal state policy in the US. If counteracting neoliberalism is the goal, a left “embrace” of the family won’t accomplish it. Overall, in surveying what Guastella gets wrong, I will attempt to make plain the antifeminism of a pro-family, pronatalist politics.

However, before we undertake that journey, we must understand the context of Guastella’s reactionary turn. Different left fractions are currently vying to determine the direction of the progressive coalition that coalesced around Bernie’s presidential runs under the “big tent” of the DSA. Guastella is among those who want to shift the progressive agenda away from antioppression demands—which is also the lesson some liberals drew from the Democrats’ November defeat. [4] It is unlikely to be a winning strategy in the short term, and is certain to fail the socialist goal of defeating capitalism.

We should not interpret demobilization as equivalent to acceptance of the status quo.
Left Defeat and Left Reaction

Today Guastella professes surprise that leftists would critique the family, and complains about the “antisocial” character of the progressive left. [5]He frames his call for promoting family formation with a morbid account of a Japanese man’s lonely, long-unnoticed death, and threatens that we as individuals and as a nation will meet the same fate if we don’t get to work marrying and bearing children. [6] Contrast these grumpy opinions with where he was at a few years ago: then he was a leader of the Philadelphia DSA chapter, and served a term on the DSA national leadership—he was elected at its 2017 convention, which I attended. At that time he was a proponent of the DSA making the Medicare for All campaign its priority. What happened?

The question is less interesting as a portrait of Guastella, whose half-baked thinkpieces are all over the internet for anyone who wants to retrace his career, and more interesting when we look at what this political shift says about the progressive US left today. In my view, that left has not yet recovered and regrouped from Bernie’s 2020 defeat. This includes the DSA, the organization I belong to and have helped lead (including as Chicago chapter cochair from 2019 to 2021). The Bernie coalition that the DSA participated in was broad and driven by a social-democratic vision. When that apparent window of political opportunity closed, the coalition dispersed. The DSA, as an organization, has not yet been able to grapple with the difficulty that Bernie’s loss presents for its various theories of social change.

The popular, unifying demand for universal healthcare serves as an example: there is no strategy for achieving this goal in the DSA or among the broader progressive left at present. It has not yet been possible to recohere the groups of activists who worked on campaigns such as Medicare for All to formulate a new strategy. The founding assumptions of the M4A campaign, and others, have been scuttled by the dramatic political shifts of the past five years.

The progressive (or, as some prefer, socialist) left has become a more unstable quantity since the DSA ceased to be its level-setter. With the exception of a new bump as of last November, its member count and participation rate have dropped off since 2021. Consequently, it no longer serves the center-defining role that it did from 2016 to 2020. We should not interpret demobilization as equivalent to acceptance of the status quo. For some who’ve lost badly and can no longer see a way to win, temporarily sitting out the “fight” is the best option. However, another response to defeat is to modify the goal. We should treat this second option with a great deal of scrutiny.

There has been a conspicuous shift in online left discourse post-Bernie. [7] There is a new inclination to critique that thing, until recently called “identity politics,” and now referred to as “wokeism” or “DEI.” On a January 29 Jacobin Radio podcast on wokeness, Vivek Chibber states that this phenomenon “comes out of a historical process of trying to stamp out the socialist left.” [ [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/confronting-capitalism-the-end-of-wokeness/id791564318?i=1000686682682 ]] A February 4 article on UnHerd titled “The Left Won’t Let Go of Woke” suggests that the social media mobbing of Chibber post-podcast is proof that wokeness is the ideology of the “professional,” “identitarian” left. [8] The proliferation of such attacks is disturbing, not because liberal identity politics is beyond critique, but because of their caricature of the positions they criticize and their orientation toward pushing their proponents out of the left coalition. It is hard to find anything positive in developments that bring prominent left voices into collaboration with rightwingers. Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara has been publicly friendly with Compact magazine founder and “postliberal” Catholic conservative Sohrab Ahmari, even speaking at his August 2023 book launch. Compact itself—which combines a (narrowly defined) pro-worker perspective with social conservatism and nationalism—is exemplary of this blurring boundary between left and right. Many Jacobin authors have published in it, and both publications share one columnist, Ben Burgis. The DSA’s analysis and vision were always partial, as is true of any democratic social movement. But these new calls for a left economic agenda shorn of its antiracist, feminist, and internationalist tenets would, if adopted, substantially shrink that vision.

What magazines publish doesn’t have a one-to-one relationship with what most people think. I don’t know of any such change in DSA members’ politics. That said, Guastella’s political convergence with the paleoconservative right on pronatalism does accord with a certain understanding of the left project. When you notice his investment in the period of postwar social democracy, you can begin to intuit how a similarly situated DSA progressive could go in his political direction. [9] For a downwardly mobile Millennial child of Boomer parents, the frustrated desire to have the same standard of living as one’s parents can and has led to working-class consciousness. But this can easily shade into the yearning to live in the same America as they did—which, politically speaking is reactionary when untempered by other influences.

Guastella’s blinkered view may find an audience; the progressive left that has been on its back foot since the late 70s and has seen public goods continually slashed as the goal of fully funded social-democratic programs has receded into the horizon. It is also largely made up of people of the Millennial generation or younger, who came to the left via their own radicalization, and have no personal experience in—or interpersonal, cross-generational connection to—those ’60s movements. Furthermore, the bifurcation between class politics and identity politics that has stymied the progressive left since 1980 continues to hold strong. [10] These circumstances contribute to making the compromises of social democracy appear acceptable—at least when they are presented as the only alternative to our current political reality.

However, the height of social democracy in the United States was not an Edenic golden age. Study of the social-democratic period and its end will likely show us, first, that reversing some of our new circumstances is not possible, and second, that reversing others is not desirable. The late ’60s, with its high level of left mobilization and radical ferment, was not a time of contentment: women didn’t like being cast as a dependent on their husband’s breadwinner wage, welfare recipients didn’t accept being subject to degrading interrogations and surveillance by state officials as a condition of aid, and students rejected universities’ in loco parentis rules, which policed sexuality and gender norms by way of curfews and dress codes. In the postwar social order, longstanding racial and gender hierarchies of US society took a particular form, in the social norm of the Fordist family wage. This norm inscribed a middle-class male worker at the top of the social hierarchy. During this time numerous left movements, as diverse as the working class itself, demanded liberation and, in doing so, challenged this norm. Most of those demands remain unmet.

Nostalgia for social democracy was never the sum total, nor even the dominant impulse of the 2016 to 2020 Bernie left. It worked in coalition with and included many leftists whose political priority was the liberation of oppressed groups. [11] Antioppression demands are indispensable—they are the interventions that sharpen our strategy and take us beyond a dead-end reformism. We must not make it our goal to claw our way back to midcentury social democracy—to do so would recodify oppressive social hierarchies whose Fordist basis has been repudiated and to a great extent dissolved. To carry the point through: to attend to feminist critiques of the family and of pronatalism is not, as Guastella contends, to elevate “fringe” elements of a left agenda—it is to value the interventions of crucial allies in the anticapitalist struggle.

The “individual” and the “family” are historically specific concepts that arose together.
A Man Deplores Individualism While Women Struggle for Personhood

Guastella’s writing is brisk and smug, like an unscrupulous salesman. He never defines key terms (such as family), marshals evidence for his claims that doesn’t actually support them, and brushes off potential interlocutors by grossly mischaracterizing their arguments. [12] This is easy enough for him to do when he is arguing that the family is a good—that is, something that most people believe already. Canards and cliches abound on this topic, and Guastella makes much use of them. My approach is therefore not to address his argument point by point—its flimsiness is obvious enough to anyone who reads it—but to tease out the concepts that he vilifies in contrast to the family. These can show us something about the contemporary discourse about families and childbearing.

Guastella falls into a common trap for those whose political vision is backward-looking: everything newfangled looks to him like the enemy. He spares no time or attention for the hopeful possibilities of connection in the twenty-first century, such as “chosen family,” the urban intermingling of races and classes, or queer intimacies that defy the norms of middle-class respectability. All he can see when he looks upon contemporary US society is a sea of alienation and meaninglessness. When he tries to explain why we went adrift, he variously blames it on a dominant “market logic” (something like the neoliberal rationality), the philosophical concept of liberal individualism, and, in a real throwback, “unchecked consumerism” in the form of people buying dishwashers and microwaves. The full force of his nostalgia can be felt in his longing for a predishwasher era. He collapses these distinct phenomena into a single caricature.

Guastella makes an important and common error when he contrasts familial altruism with the “vice” of individualism. This adopts both the erroneous theorization of the individual as separate from the family and the uncritical conception of the autonomy of the individual as conceived by liberalism. In that, he ignores (or willfully mischaracterizes) a broad swath of Marxist feminist critique that shows the fallacy of the individualism-versus-family values opposition.

The “individual” and the “family” are historically specific concepts that arose together—just as we know that, for every person who strides forth confidently and independently into the public world, they were supported and propped up by somebody at some point (probably that morning). The individual’s autonomy is the flipside of the individual’s dependence on and responsibility for his family.

In classical liberal theory, as Wendy Brown writes in “Liberalism’s Family Values,” women were imagined as attached to and subordinate to a man and obligated to children. They were not granted the status of individuals. Instead their bonds enabled the men they supported to act as autonomous free agents in the public sphere. [13]

The autonomy of the individual is a construct of liberalism, the dominant ideology of capitalism. Marxists know that liberalism imagines free contractual relations only by ignoring unfreedoms in the broader social context. For example, when a worker takes a low-wage job because their other option is eviction and homelessness, this is hardly a choice. Liberalism is premised on the steadfastness of certain unspoken illiberal bonds—obligations that are not optional. Women’s work in the home for the family is one of those bonds that the liberal story of individual autonomy conceals. This hidden, uncompensated labor—known by Marxist feminists as social reproduction—includes the daily care, feeding, generational birthing, and rearing of workers. Capital couldn’t exploit workers without it. To justify this gendered division of labor, liberal family values encourage selflessness for women: to this day the family is premised on women finding their fulfillment in service to the family. Liberal familialism is thus structurally oppressive to women as a gender.

The structural nature of that oppression is key, and it is one of the most glaring omissions in Guastella’s discussion of the family. A husband and father himself, Guastella must understand that the production of babies requires the labor of women, but he spends more time extolling the reward of family life than he does thinking about the burdens it places on women (and of course, a man would). Indeed, he barely mentions feminism or the gendered division of labor and seems to be both ignorant of feminist critiques of the family and uninterested in learning what they are, much less addressing them.

Women are still struggling for the autonomy that liberal individualism grants and attributes to men. The family, as a unit of social reproduction, is a primary site of that struggle. Right now, the United States denies women their basic human rights by criminalizing abortion in two-fifths of states, on the basis of the state interest in “fetal life.” As we’ve long known, when a legal system and health system deny women reproductive care, it harms women’s health, even to the point of death. Moreover, abortion bans deprive women of bodily autonomy. The state’s current orientation is toward protecting “fetal life” over that of the woman carrying it. Guastella’s family promotion proposal begs the question: which comes first, the abstraction of the birth rate and the supposed revitalization of the national economy through raising it, or women’s value as people rather than reproductive vessels? You can’t have both.

Guastella’s pronatalism trods obliviously on women’s status as persons. In effect, his proposal conscripts women into the work of making babies as a duty to the nation. In the gendered division of labor that we live with, childbearing is a form of labor that only women can do. Childrearing is a form of labor that is still mostly done by women, and men rarely do it alone (single father-headed households are a small minority of those raising children). Absent the socialization of childbearing and rearing, calls to raise the birth rate are dictates to women about their life’s path. On this basis, there is a strong feminist case against any scheme that holds up raising the birth rate as a solution to problems of the economy or of national “vitality.” While it is doubtful that a pronatalist policy program would improve the economy as working-class people experience it, it is certain that such a program will diminish women’s freedom and deepen their subordination.

Ultimately, promoting the institution of the family as a good is antifeminist, because it demands women’s social reproductive labor, while simultaneously concealing and devaluing it. If the family is the institution to uphold, then everything possible must be done to direct women’s self-expression to a maternal role—including, when necessary and when politically feasible, denying women bodily autonomy. Nevertheless, conservatives continue stumping for the joys of family life because their project can’t get anywhere without some cooperation from women. This is why the pronatalist paleoconservatives such as Vance hold that the one indispensable source of self-fulfillment in life is in sacrificing oneself for family and children. Against this claim, feminists insist that women must have the right to follow their own interests, desires, and aspirations even if these don’t include childbearing.

Neoliberalism enforces family responsibility with a cruel logic: a couple who can’t afford rent without both their incomes are a couple who stick together.
Family Values Whether You Like Them or Not

Guastella seems to be frustrated by nuance, which is a good reason not to appoint him strategist for our movement. This is on full view in his treatment of Melinda Cooper’s argument in Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. According to him, Cooper “argues that neoliberalism is not a regime built around the individual, but one built around the family.” He counters that “families dissolved in the neoliberal era,” and exposure to market forces is to blame. [14]

The relationship between neoliberalism and the institution of the family is not so simple as this. As Cooper clearly and inexorably demonstrates, the family was neither targeted by neoliberals for destruction, nor neglected. The view that the family is a mere victim or casualty of neoliberalism is simply wrong. Rather, promoting family responsibility is a constitutive goal of neoliberalism, one that has guided US state policy in the era from the 1970s to the present. [15]

Guastella doesn’t give any sign of having read Cooper’s book, much less engaging with her argument, which explains why his thinking doesn’t extend beyond the oft-repeated sentiment that neoliberalism is “hard on families.” There is a kernel of truth to this. More state funding of public goods would benefit everyone, including parents and children. But this cliche doesn’t tell us whose families, in what way it is hard, by what mechanisms, what reasons the neoliberals give for inflicting it, or whose interests “making it difficult” may serve. As Cooper recounts, family values were central to the concerns of US neoliberals. The chief initiator of British neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, was herself arguing in favor of the (family) value of mutual obligation when she made the famous “no such thing [as society]” statement that Guastella misconstrues. This should give pause to any serious left thinker sympathetic to Guastella’s proposal to promote the family as a “good,” and should inspire us to review such a proposal with scrutiny.

Neoliberalism enforces family responsibility with a cruel logic: a couple who can’t afford rent without both their incomes are a couple who stick together. A young adult who can’t afford college without student loans is a child who remains bound to her parent. Lack of public spending on public goods forces poor and working-class people into economic dependence on their relatives. Meanwhile, for the rich, the private family is reinforced as a main conduit for wealth transmission. In the context of neoliberalism, promoting family responsibility is a means of increasing the wealth and power of the asset-owning and business classes, while tying the hands of poor and working-class people, by overloading them with private household debt that forms what Cooper calls intergenerational “webs of economic obligation.”

Neoliberals reached back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, and their corollaries in the American colonies, to find precedent for punitive family responsibility. But to find assumptions about family structure baked into state policy, they didn’t have to go back so far. The idea that the state is filling in for an absent family member—usually, a wage-earning man who headed the household—is a recurrent premise within welfare history in the United States. In the Progressive Era, activists secured “mothers’ pensions” at the state and local level by arguing that (white) mothers should receive public aid in order to promote children’s welfare and ease the burden of raising children without a male income. The welfare state’s creation with the New Deal and expansion with the Social Security Act still divided its programs along class, gender, and racial lines. Women who fit the norms of respectability—having been married to a man who earned enough to pay into Social Security—received aid from the higher-status federally administered Social Security program. Never-married single mothers got Aid to Dependent Children (ADC, later AFDC)—a lower-status program administered by the states, which, in the 40s and 50s, loaded up the program with administrative roadblocks designed to police its recipients’ morality. These included “man-in-the-house” rules barring women from receiving benefits if they were in a sexual relationship with a man.

As Cooper observes, state imposition of family values was not limited to the neoliberal era, nor perpetrated solely by the right. Up until the 1960s, Democrats and Republicans were both in favor of redistributive social welfare, as doled out according to the principle of the Fordist family wage. (As we will see shortly, that consensus would fall apart by the mid-70s, marking the end of the social-democratic era and the beginning of the neoliberal one.) In the tumultuous period of the 60s and early 70s, prominent voices on both the left and right located the cause of pressing social problems in the Black family, which they saw as having been weakened by a number of factors including the incentives of a welfare system that disincentivized marriage and male breadwinning. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in his infamous report that the “pathological” female-led Black family structure was the root cause of Black poverty and crime. [16] Many on the left objected to Moynihan’s statements about the causes of Black people’s disadvantage—yet they broadly agreed with his conclusion that both the means of remedying that disadvantage and the end goal of its redress would involve repairing the Black family. [17] Toward this end, liberals thought the administration and incentive structure of welfare could be manipulated to encourage the male breadwinner family model. Thus, in the age of welfare state expansion, liberals saw the welfare state as a means to encourage the formation and stability of traditionally structured families.

If we jump ahead to Bill Clinton’s signing of TANF into law in 1996, we see similar messaging for a markedly different public policy. Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF) was a piece of welfare reform legislation that rolled back (redistributive) payments to low-income households, making benefits both temporary and dependent on work requirements. Once again, the stated goal—this time the goal that reducing public spending on welfare was intended to accomplish—was to strengthen families by strengthening family responsibility.

Promoting the family, then, was an explicit goal of two drastically different policies: welfare-state redistribution and antiredistributive neoliberal policies. The history of state welfarism’s interventions in regard to the family is sobering: time and again, it has determined deserving versus undeserving recipients based on their fulfillment of family responsibility. It is largely a story of state-imposed family values, rather than the state’s enablement of a variety of different ways of life. [18]

The progressive left should heed the calls of the women of the 1960s welfare rights movement to stop using a moralistic, racist schema to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor. Moynihan was wrong to locate the source of social problems, such as poverty, in a particular Black family structure; it is equally wrongheaded to blame loneliness among the elderly and the lack of social provision for end-of-life care on the chosen childlessness of young adults. Guastella demonstrates the limits of this type of chauvinistic outlook: when he posits that “strong family life, in any given society, is not contrary to progress but coincident with it,” he defines progress as nothing more than his own reflection. [19]

The family is only one form of sociality, one way of human life. People are inventing other ways of life all the time. These are legitimate too even if they don’t involve bearing or raising children. To suggest that society is only making progress when people are forming families is to delegitimate whatever doesn’t fit your definition of a family. To say families are the best place to learn altruism and selflessless is to say by implication that non-family-forming individuals are selfish. These charges are both untrue and counterproductive for the progressive left project. As feminists such as Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh have pointed out, it is the family that is antisocial, insofar as its dominance discourages the formation of other, more collective human connections. [20] References to history reinforce this point, since we find that the notion of private family relations as the place to learn and express altruism is a middle-class ideology, which emerged in the Gilded Age to justify that class’s withdrawal from broader social responsibility [21]

The left fights for a freer and more equal world. Regarding the family, it should support policies that free people from the need to reproduce oppressive family structures and dynamics. Among the means of doing so, encouraging solidaristic social bonds that cross and transcend families will be one of the most important. Valorization of the private family is a cause of atomization, rather than a cure. Against Guastella’s call for “more and stronger families,” we should call for more and stronger solidarities.

…given that the left is not a monolith, whose interests are served by viewing social democracy as the be-all end-all and advocating that left try to make its way back there? Why not imagine a different way of life, that creates new structures of care instead of reproducing unequal and oppressive ones????
A Fighting Left and a Smaller Role for the Family

The particular form of redistributive state welfare that poor and working-class people enjoyed in the mid-twentieth century has ceased to be. The left needs to understand why, to inform our strategy in the long-term fight against capitalism. I disagree with Guastella when he argues that we should pursue a quixotic effort to recreate postwar material conditions, and with him and other leftists when they dismiss and disparage left critiques of hierarchies other than class. If we study the social-democratic period and its end, we will find much to learn from the radical antioppression movements that came into being then, particularly in the 60s and 70s. The experiences that motivated these struggles, their strategies, their theoretical critiques, and their outcomes are all instructive. If the progressive left’s goal is to enable greater human freedom and equality, then we ought to pay attention to historical moments when these things were struggled for in a militant way, and sometimes (even if only briefly) achieved.

One edifying example is the welfare rights movement. During the ’60s, through the efforts of welfare recipients in the National Welfare Rights Organization and civil rights lawyers, many state-level welfare rules were overturned. Per Supreme Court decisions such as King v. Smith, states could no longer use “man-in-the-house” or similar intrusive rules to prevent women from receiving federal welfare benefits. This led to a window of time when federal welfare came without (familial) strings attached: a moment of what we might identify as a true increase in freedom for poor women—­­­especially for Black women, targeted by these rules. The welfare mothers’ victories got under the skin of neoliberal economists and social conservatives. Their obsessional grudge against AFDC is revealing: these people didn’t want women, especially poor Black women, to evade the social norm of the Fordist family wage. For these women to have the means to live and raise children without having to give up (to name one important example) sexual freedom, was read as betokening the collapse of the social order.

Looking back, it appears that these observers had cause to be nervous—at least for themselves. At that time, federal policies were weakening inherited wealth’s class-determining power—that is, in other words, weakening the family. Moreover, radical movements were trying to level social hierarchies and explode their justifications. Both liberal and neoconservative thinkers connected the supposed excess, irresponsibility, and libertinism of these movements to the (perceived) crisis of inflation. It bears underscoring: this fear of social change was not limited to the right. Efforts to preserve the current order also spoke to the interests of liberals, insofar as they were not at the bottom of its hierarchies. As Cooper details, starting in the late 60s, both liberal and neoconservative thinkers honed in on the primary concerns and assumptions of neoliberalism, while converging in their thinking and goals. They then worked in concert to turn the political tide against redistributive welfare and Keynesian federal spending, and toward the gutting of the public sector that we now recognize as a defining aspect of neoliberalism. In other words, the reaction was so significant that it seems to continue to this day. Crucially, neoliberals have insistently emphasized the family as a corrective to excess, irresponsibility, and libertinism.

Given this context, we must interrogate Guastella’s investment in the family, especially a normative family consisting of two married parents and their children. I don’t think Guastella spent much reflecting on these issues before gracing us with his essay, but we need to consider his convergence with both a newly ascendent reactionary paleoconservatism and a neoliberal political project that’s been immiserating working-class people for the last half-century. Moreover, given that the left is not a monolith, whose interests are served by viewing social democracy as the be-all end-all and advocating that left try to make its way back there? Why not imagine a different way of life, that creates new structures of care instead of reproducing unequal and oppressive ones?

To envision a society that is equal and free for all people, the progressive left must incorporate radical critiques of institutions and ways of life that are near and dear to some of us. I’ve sought to demonstrate ways that political demands from some of the segments of the working class that are the most oppressed, such as poor Black women, sharpen our analysis of capitalism and point a way forward in our fight for freedom for all.

I hope that few DSA leftists will fool themselves into thinking that pronatalist economic nationalism constitutes progressive politics. I have dwelt in this essay on the subordination of women that this scheme assumes and reinforces. It is clear—perhaps even more viscerally—that it also punishes immigrants. Guastella scoffs at the concept of open borders and what he flippantly describes as the idea that we should “import” babies rather than invest in making them. Vance and Trump, of course, are currently enacting an ostentatiously cruel anti-immigrant program, and claim to be arresting hundreds of undocumented immigrants each day. Guastella shares the paleoconservatives’ desire to maintain the subordination of undocumented immigrants in the hierarchy of citizenship. Though immigrants and refugees are members of US society, in Guastella’s scheme they literally don’t count (for population numbers), and by implication their interests are discounted. The same is true for other people who reside on this planet outside US borders. At a time when new international solidarity is needed to confront capitalism’s global crises, such as pandemics and climate change, this is an especially wrongheaded view. Trying to solve US workers’ woes in the twenty-first century by narrowing the focus to the nation and the family is the strategic equivalent of billionaires buying islands to hide out in; it simply sells out everyone not on our metaphorical island.

Finally, if Guastella’s aim is to water down progressive demands to make the left more approachable, this too is a losing proposition. This would have the effect of making us less distinct from both liberal centrists (whose politics seem to be fast losing their appeal) and right-wing socially conservative nationalists (who will always beat us at the game Guastella wants us to play). While Guastella presumes that “profamily” is an enduringly common-sense, populist position, the progressive left shouldn’t accept this. It’s not simply a matter of rhetoric: how the left frames its program both demonstrates its commitments and educates its members. Feminist critiques of familialism and pronatalism counsel us not to accept elisions of women’s labor in our economic schemes. By demanding that we do not default to the family but continue to come up with other ways of organizing how we reproduce ourselves, they keep our vision transformative, which is what we need. If welfare militants won gains in the 60s, leftists today, with the perspective of that struggle’s history, can win new freedoms as well. To that end, the progressive left’s vision needs to stay capacious enough to include the goal of defeating capitalism as well as its specific oppressions. Guastella’s framework does neither, so we should reject it. The left can do better than JD Vance Lite.

Spectre

P.S.


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Footnotes


[1] Dustin Guastella, “In Pursuit of the Family,” Damage, November 18, 2024,https://damagemag.com/2024/11/18/in....


[2] Dustin Guastella, “Where Do We Go After Last Night’s Defeat,” Jacobin, March 11, 2020, https://jacobin.com/2020/03/bernie-...; Jordy Cummings, “From the Socialism of Fools to Social Democracy in One Country: Averting the Red/Brown Temptation,“ Spectre, July 21, 2020, https://spectrejournal.com/from-the....


[3] Emma Green, “The New Pro-Life Playbook,” New Yorker, November 11, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/mag... .


[4] Maureen Down, “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics,” New York Times, November 9, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/....


[5] Dustin Guastella, “Anti-Social Socialism Club,” Damage, March 22, 2023, https://damagemag.com/2023/03/22/an....


[6] Guastella, “In Pursuit of the Family.”


[7] Additional examples to this trend than the ones listed below can be found in Janakiram and Lessards “Tradwives and Femcels.” Emily Janakiram and Megan Lessard, “Tradwives and Femcels: The Women of the New Right Work Hard to Make Marriage Edgy Again,” Lux, no. 8 (2023): https://lux-magazine.com/article/tr....


[8] Catherine Liu, “The Left won’t let go of Woke: So much for the ‘vibe shift,’” UnHerd, February 4, 2025, https://unherd.com/2025/02/the-left...] Over at the more reactionary Quillette, we find a self-identified conservative writing “Trump and the DEI Revolution,” an approving commentary on Trump’s evisceration of federal DEI and affirmative action. [https://quillette.com/2025/02/08/trump-and-the-dei-counter-revolution-affirmative-action-civil-rights/.


[9] Dustin Guastella, “Is Nostalgia a Dead End?” Jacobin, February 4, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/02/postwar....


[10] Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, (Beacon Press, 2003), xv–xvi.


[11] https://midwestsocialist.com/2018/04/15/how-should-socialists-organize-reflections-on-the-lift-the-ban-campaign/


[12] From his call to raise the marriage rate as well as the birth rate, we can infer that Guastella has something like the two-parent household in mind. For purposes of my opposition to family-promotion, I mean the institution within and by which the rich build up their wealth and keep it to themselves, and the institution that divides and opposes the interests of people by gender and age within households, and by race and class between them.


[13] Wendy Brown, “Liberalism’s Family Values,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 1995), 135–65.


[14] Guastella, “In Pursuit of the Family.”


[15] Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017).


[16] Office of Policy Planning and Research United States Department of Labor, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” U.S Department of Labor, March, 1965, https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdo....


[17] Cooper, Family Values, 40-42.


[18] A different outcome from state welfare programs is possible, however. These programs could meet people’s needs for economic support in such a way that depending financially on partners and relatives would no longer be necessary, or drastically less so. I believe there is liberatory potential in, for example, delinking romantic love from economic codependency, the better to allow it to flourish—a change that Engels and Kollontai might approve.


[19] Guastella, “In Pursuit of the Family.”


[20] Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-social Family (Verso, 2015).


[21] Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, (BasicBooks, 1992).



Robin Peterson
Robin Peterson is a writer living in Chicago. As a DSA member, she has been active in electoral work and campaigns against housing displacement.


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