Last month, the Democratic Socialists of America argued that the traditional family is a repressive, capitalist institution that should be abolished and replaced by state-managed collective care. They support state control of child-rearing and the use of surrogacy to break family bonds. This approach aims to increase state power by replacing natural family ties with dependence on the government, claiming it will free people from the “slavery” of marriage and family, according to Ryan McMaken at LewRockwell.com. He writes:
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. […]
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. […]
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.
Read more here.
