Thread by @realLandsEnd

A lot of ink has been spilled lately—especially from a few particular publications—trying to paint the left as anti-child. The evidence? Cartoonish specters of abolition & family abolition—flattened to fit a smug “we’re not like other leftists” performance for an imaginary middle

Abolition. Family abolition. Health communism. These aren’t fringe fever dreams of an anti-child radical left. They’re traditions specifically rooted in care, survival & futurity. They ask: what would it take for everyone (especially kids) to live a good life, not just scrape by?

When we told our Death Panel listeners that we were having a baby, hundreds of people wrote in to say some version of the same thing: that knowing, loving & raising children further radicalized them & exposed how the world is built to punish vulnerability & make care impossible.

Abolition has always been about kinship, future-building, collective survival & refusal to let anyone be disappeared. It’s never just been about tearing down, it’s about building a world where we all have what we need to live, raise each other & grow, beyond punishment & scarcity

Family abolition continues that fight, not by destroying families, but by refusing to let the capitalist family be the only place care and futurity can happen. It’s not a rejection of kids. It’s a rejection of a world that treats kids like private property or burdens to bear.

Family abolition is about ending the state’s exploitation of family as a stand-in for public infrastructure. No housing? Rely on family. No healthcare or safety net? Family. The neoliberal family is privately subsidized state abandonment dressed with a sentimental smokescreen.

Family abolition is about asking why families are expected to do everything alone. Why housing, food, medical care, love, education & even basic safety, are things you earn through the “right” kind of family. Why family can be the pretense by which these are denied to people?

Family abolition is about more love, more care, more connection. What if we didn’t force people to stay in violent homes just to survive? What if we made care & futurity a public commons, not a private crisis? These are all principles of abolition, hence the name family abolition

But instead of engaging with these ideas on their merits, certain left-ish commentators prefer to sneer from the sidelines. “We’re not like those other leftists,” they say.

Okay—but what are you, then? Because chasing respectability hasn’t gotten us a future either.

If instead of engaging with any of this on the level of political substance, your whole analysis hinges on throwing comrades under the bus, you’re not doing left strategy. You’re doing vibes-based third way centrism pleading to an imaginary silent majority embodying your anxiety

This obsession with looking “serious” to people who don’t share your values is political rot. We don’t need to be palatable. We need to be useful. We need ideas that meet ppl where they are—in ruins of neoliberal privatization & carceral infrastructure—& help them fight like hell

Raising a child throws you headfirst into contradictions btwn what is & should be. That tension between love & systemic abandonment is where abolitionist politics start & keeps us going towards a shared horizon. Conceptually & materially: no one should have to do this alone.

Family abolition & abolition are left movements that take children seriously: as ppl, as thinkers & theorists of their liberation, & as part of a collective horizon. If you think that’s unserious? That says more about your politics than ours. If that threatens your politics? Good