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Early last month, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)sponsored a panel on the family at the organization’s Socialism Conference 2025. The organization described the topic this way: “How should the left relate to the family? Socialist analysis makes clear that the nuclear family form is an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.”
The roundtable featured Olivia Katbi, the co chair of Portland DSA; Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago; and Katie Gibson, a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Key observations from the panelists included:
  • “When we talk about family abolition, we’re talking about the abolition of the economic unit… all of our material needs taken care of by the collective.”
  • “We argue for abolition of the family in general… the institution of the family acts as part of the carceral system.”
Naturally, these leftists partly want to abolish the family because they agree with Marx that the family is a “bourgeois” institution that must be destroyed in order to clear the way for the socialist utopia. Another element of opposition to the family comes from the Left’s bizarre preoccupation with commodifying sex. It is ironic that these “anti-capitalists” seek so vehemently to turn sex into an economic commodity, but this appears to be a key tenet of leftist thinking in recent decades. Thus, they seek to normalize sex work. This is partly because the Left views marriage as a type of sex work itself. After all, the family is “inherently repressive,” and all sex within marriage is essentially rape. It is therefore “progress” to abolish marital sex and replace it with “sex work.” …
At the core of all of this is opposition to the family as an independent institution, and the leftist contention that the family must be placed totally under the control of the state.
Whatever the Left might have to say about the economic mechanisms supposedly underlying the family, the fact is the Left’s hatred for the family mostly stems from the fact that the family is an obstacle to state power.
As I noted in this lecture last year, the family is an institution that predates all states and which is natural to the human condition and to all human societies. …
This has been key in building up state power, and the sidelining of the family is so important to the Left because resistance to the state has tended to be centered around some cultural or local institutional loyalty. Historically, this often took the form of local networks of families and their allies. Tocqueville noted that these groups provided a ready nexus around which to organize opposition to government abuses. He writes,
As long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone; he looked about him, and found his clients, his hereditary friends, and his kinsfolk. If this support was wanting, he was sustained by his ancestors and animated by his posterity.
. Without these, or similar institutions, Tocqueville concluded, political opposition to the state becomes ineffective. Specifically, without institutions through which to practically build resistance to state power, even anti-regime ideology has no way of being brought into practice:
He continues:
What strength can even public opinion have retained, when no twenty persons are connected by a common tie; when not a man, nor a family ... has the power of representing that opinion; and when every citizen—being equally weak, equally poor, and equally dependant [sic]—has only his personal impotence to oppose to the organized force of the government?
The reduction of individuals to impotent, isolated units—who interact primarily with state agents—is the ultimate outcome of the Left’s efforts, regardless of what its stated goals may be. Instead of independent family groups, bonded by biology and ancient, natural modes of human affection and loyalty, we are instead to have, as the “norm,” state-regulated sex workers and state-apportioned children, conceived by IVF and grown in surrogate wombs. This, the left tells us, will free us from the “slavery” of marriage and family, and replace capitalism with the “freedom” to be utterly alone, atomistic, and without social or economic bonds outside the state.
Yes, down with the family, up with the state!! What are these people thinking? This is clearly a sign that Marxism is only a religion and nothing else. This is not an economic system it is a system of totalitarianism and brutality to the human species. Perhaps there is some sort of hidden meaning behind all of this theorizing that I just don’t see or understand, other than just collars and chains everywhere. Is it nothing but turtles all the way down? Would that be the end of the human species? Are these Marxist, Democratic Socialists even human or are they only a bunch of ETs aliens?
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Of course, the progressive/lefty/collectivist/Marxist/socialist/communist/murderers only think of amassing power! The big problems come when they start using that power the way they imagine they can. The results are horrifying.
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