Im very excited tonight to welcome emmy obrien to discuss her new book family, abolition capitalism and the coming rising of care. M e obrien writes on gender and communist theory. She coedited two magazines pinko on gay and praxis. And so on. Psychoanalytic theory and politics. She previously coauthored the novel everything for everyone, an oral history on the new york commune 2052 to 2072. In conversation tonight, i will be lara sheehi and assistant professor of clinical psychology, the George Washington university, where she is the founding faculty director of the psychoanalysis us and the arab world lab. She is a coauthor with stephen. She home of psychoanalysis under occupation practicing resistance in palestine, which won the middle east 2022 palestine book award for best academic. Also in conversation tonight will be helen devinney a member of the core faculty at George WashingtonUniversity Side program. She has written and presented on the intersections of psychoanalysis and issues of gender, sexuality race and ability. Helen has private practice in washington, dc, where she works with folks to explore psych socio political factors alongside individual so that suffering is understood in the context of the white so set ableist imperialist patriarchy and not an individual alone. So without further ado, please welcome me in joining to politics and prose m e obrien lara sheehi and helen devinney. Hi folks. How are you . You are in for a treat. My name is laura and i so excited to be in conversation with michelle. Im not going to talk for very long, but i just want to let you that theres you know, theres these books that you read and, your mind just breaks, right . And just like keeps expanding through it. And theres this way in which sometimes it leads to a certain place and then sometimes it fails to do that. This is one of those books that has the feel of leading you to a certain place and has to me, you will know how much it means to me a phenomenon sort of unreal in clarity about it. So im so excited for you all to be here to hear it directly from michelles mouth. And then helen and i will be in conversation. What about this book . Sort of stood out to us. But im just going to pass it along to you. Im just excited. You all are here and get to hear her speak because thats what all i want to do, i thank you for that very generous introduction. Laura and. Thank you to you both for being here. I appreciate your support and, hearing your own thoughts and insights. And i have lot of familiar faces in the audience. I live in new york, so its very exciting to be down here in d. C. And everyone who helped set up this and the workers here at the bookstore. So im going to just read you the six pages. Someone cant hear you im going to read to you the first six pages of my book. So i will try to do so audibly. And then were here from the other panelists and then hopefully have a little of time for questions and discussion. In june 2000, six, 3000 Police Officers attacked teachers protest in the mexican city of oaxaca. The teachers been on strike for a month, occupying the Central Square of the city. The police and teachers battled for hours the course of the day, leading to over 100 hospitals. Patients in the aftermath of the confrontation, hundreds of social Movement Organizations gathered to form the assembly, a popular. They lost pueblos. They were haka. The apo, an organization that became the central coordinating body of hundreds of protests and occupations over the coming seven months. In august, insurgent women seized control of multiple radio stations, going on to use them as communication for the movement. At the end of, one radio broadcast of an occupied station, the newscaster concluded, transmitting from the oaxaca commune. Insurgents took up the name, referencing the Paris Commune of 1871. The militant of the oaxaca commune erected hundreds of barricades throughout the city. The use the barricades to defend their neighborhoods against nightly attacks by police and paramilitary areas. Many workers were strike living full time at the barricades. Many not on strike went to their jobs during the day and the night on the barricades when their days work was done. Insurgents communicated with each other from one barricade to the next using radio, and began to identify themselves by the name their barricade. These barricades became sites of what i call insurgent social reproduction. The transformation of the daily tasks of Household Labor into means sustaining militant protest, baruch capella writes. The barricades were places where the people of oaxaca slept, cooked and food had sex shared news and came together at the end of the day. Women on, the barricades redistributed, seized goods conducted educational workshops, gathered supplies together and shared life. Peller goes on. People to the commune simply because they took part in this reproduction daily life from cooking at the barricades, carrying coffee to the barricades, homes or businesses, carrying between barricades to make molotov barricades, stacking rocks or simply sharing stories. The women of the oaxaca commune were engaged. A moment of family abolition. They were rebelling against both abuse of husbands and racist and antiworker state forces. They were challenging the social role to. They were relegated as women. As wives as mothers. Upending the norms of gender and sexuality. Their collective rebellion in their collective labor. Made rebellion. Possible. Rather than the atomized isolation of private households during rebellion. People lived collectively the barricades. What had been womens work in the home became daily practice of reproducing the insurrection through the barricades. The women. The hakka commune created a new collective life that overcame the divisions between public and private. They were fuzing the private as a link in the circuits of racial capitalism. For these women rejecting, men of the family was not a move towards isolation or a band of caretaking relationships. They brought their children with them to the barricades. They were not simply rejecting the maternal caretaking, but radically transforming it. They were expanding care, labor of their private homes into mass in subjection, Free Movement for the transfer of society as a whole, and creating the collective life. The barricades. They were constituting a new basis for shared social reproduction and shared intimacy. They were transforming the isolation of domestic life into a means of communal survival. The daily life of the barricades and the citys other occupations became a site of escalating struggle. Many husbands frustrated their wives at the barricades were no longer serving them in their home, forced their wives to abandon the occupation. A participant recounts. They were comrades, complained that since august 1st, my doesnt serve me. There are many women who suffered Domestic Violence for being at the occupations and marches. Sometimes their husbands attempted to divorce or separate the husbands. They didnt take well. The idea of women abandoning the housework to participate politically. They didnt help in the sense of doing the housework. Such as taking care of kids or washing clothes so that women could continue being at the station. Quote, the reassertion of the family as a system of private dominated households contributed to the defeat of the hakka commune. The women could not act both frontline militants and obedient wives. The family was a tool of counterinsurgency. The women of the hakka rebelled against a System Private households, male dominated kinship arrangements, and the gendered of labor. All these or dimensions of the family form characterize most peoples lives under racial capitalism, families typically exist as private households and segmented isolation from each other. Divided by architecture, resources, Public Policy and custom. Each family works separately, helping to reproduce capitalist society from one generation to the next. Families raised, children and offer them their first socialization and heteronormative norms and labor market discipline through maintaining a stable family, individuals may gain legitimacy social acceptance and respectability. Peoples arrangements and households are judged by the extent to which they manage to an ideal of the family, rooted in a long history of White Supremacy and capitalism. Through the hakka commune, women sought to overcome the family form. Their efforts, in turn, made the scale of the mobilization possible. Many rebellions share this quality when large numbers of working class people move into open rebellion. The boundaries of the family begin. Break down. The private gives way to the collective life of shared insurgent social reproduction and those subjugated within the private family seize. The opportunities of new ways of and living together rather rigid gender roles. People may begin to care for each other as comrade, replacing the private family kitchens or take out from local. People may gather protest kitchens can and group meals care for children. The injured and others unable to work becomes a shared concern of collective projects of survival. Family abolition. A horizon of human freedom one briefly visible. The barricades of the oaxaca commune. The family is a limit to human emancipate and the familys horrors are vast. Its abuses widespread, its logic coercive. The family is a joy for some a necessity for most, and a nightmare for far too many. Behind its closed doors. The household is. A gamble. Children born into abusive households have no recourse from harmful parents. Those trapped in abusive couple relationships recedes there see means of escape gradually off by manipulative and controlling partners. Those working class adults who wish to be a part of a childs life are forced into degrees of economic precarity to keep their children fed and cared for, trapping poor parents further into awful jobs. Theyre seats right here in the front. If you want to come up the family, Police System targets black, indigent as poor and migrant families with forms of state violence in the name of protecting children, leaving the violence of the white propertied family untouched. The family is also a limit to our imagination. Many of us grow up in private and struggle to envision anything. We can barely conceive of real alternatives to the family shared households or a necessary survival strata for proletarians. Most working class families come under frequent pressure from labor market conditions. State policies or state violence. These pressures make it hard to form and hold together families, but even harder to maintain chosen. Nonnormative arrangements. Many imagine and pursue a household that is entirely too chosen and a radical alternative to the normative family. But attempts at holding such arrangements together often fall apart over decades of the stresses, trying to find and maintain work to pay rent, to deal with medical emergencies, or to face aging. Others fully shared. Households altogether, often to find isolation and loneliness, but some beyond, some variation on the private household. What could possibly provide the care that we all so desperately. Family abolition is a fraught right bring critics accuse proponents of family abolition of trying to destroy gender market relations and civilization. Progressive opponents of the idea suggested its an ultra left and fantasy likely to alienate people for closing the mass constituency for social democratic demands. Some astute skeptics of family abolition point out indigenous and people of color on family relations to survive the racist onslaught of the state. Many imagine family abolition calls for the acceleration the current neoliberal social forces that make having children finding a stable home, challenging so many people. These of family abolition reflect deep anxieties. Many people rely on their family when they are at their most vulnerable as newborns, children while sick or disabled, while aging and approaching death. For those lucky enough to have loving family members, such support can be a source of great solace. Even those with unsupportive families of origin may keep them close throughout their lives. Those who raise us have a profound impact on our emotional, physical and development. Parenting in turn, can be an extraordinary space. Selfgrowth and the experience of Long Term Care for another person. Unlike most relationship parts in capitalist society, families can offer what feels to be an uncanny addition an unconditional and unwavering form of love, at least some times. It is through the language of family. People often articulate their yearning for care, for affection, for the long term interweaving our lives. For those with cruel or harmful families, the idea of doing a better for healing chosen family can be profoundly compelling. Family abolition provokes listeners fears of being abandoned have been without support of left alone to face the violent power of the state or the cruelty of work. These are nearly universal fears an era of neoliberal decision on if social welfare supports increasing atomization of capitalist society, racist state violence and generalized instability. Many imagined family as the left robbing them of only means of solace and survival. In their imagination to abolish the family is to make the world unlivable. Human life depends on care. We are all inescapably interdependent in our society. Many forms of care are often concentrated in families. Everyone needs material, supports. For some, these are found through families to jobs or property. Safe housing, Financial Support during difficult times. Healthy food mobility or Quality Health care. But the basis of a rich human life also includes the emotional, interpersonal, physical support families provide. These are all basic human needs, and the family is where most likely to have found them. To those who fear family abolition, abolish the family system often involves eliminating access to care. The opposite is true. Family abolition. A commitment to making the care necessary for Human Flourishing freely available throughout society, rather than relying solely ones immediate personal relation. Access to care could built into the social fabric of our collective lives, family abolition is the vision that the basis of thrive should not depend on who. Your parents happen to be who you love or who you choose to live with family abolition is a horizon of sexual and gender freedom beyond the bigotry imposed by those on whom we depend. Family abolition is the expansion of care as a universal, unconditional good. Family abolition not just the positive assertion of, but also refusal the harm harmful relationships, domination that the family enables. Family is a belief that no child be trapped by cruel parents. No woman should be afraid of poverty or isolation and leaving her violent husband. No aging, disabled or person should be afraid of having depend on an indifferent and, uncaring family member. Family abolition is the recognition that no human being should ever own or entirely another person, even. No individual should have the means to coerce or labor from another. As current property relations enable family, abolish sin is the destruction of private households as systems of accumulating power and property at the cost others wellbeing, as well as overcoming the private. Family abolition is also the radical overturning and how society values particular family at the expense of others. A long history of white heteronormativity, capitalist property relations enshrined a particularly narrow version of the family as the basis of an orderly society. Certainly certain family are upheld and law enforced. State violence and defended popular culture. Family abolition is a call for embracing the many forms and care of loved. Through which people form rich and fulfilling lives. It is for the destruction overcoming of an ideal that treats some Family Structures as normal, while devaluing and destroying other care relations. In the spirit of the osaka commune, let us advance. You political. Thank you for that. A whole different experience of having somebody speak their own words. Right. So thank you for walking us through that. And of course, in terms of locating it within and struggle, that belongs to a sort of Brown Indigenous people. And i think thats where i also want to locate this. And also want to say a word about im not going to talk very long because i want this sort of be a collaborative process, but i also want a center. So where im coming from, when i think about abolition, so i borrow here, of course from abolition as to our currently very active and central in the movement. So Ruth Wilson Gilmore being primary to my thinking when she teaches us that abolition not about destruction its about right its not about absence its about having presence. And so i think this goes throughout your book and i think thats my entry point to the book of when we think about abolition. Yes, it is about abolishing prisons, which can be a symbol of violence, but more than that, its about abolishing the conditions that create the potential for exploitation and domination. And relationships are the centerpiece of that. And so thats what flows to book for me and where i find the pulse of the book really bring us back to constantly every time theres a sort of fault line that we might feel like we stray. Michelle you sort of bring us right back and you also talk about capitalism and imperialism and colonialism and settler colonialism as those those are the ones that sort allow or might hide the modes of domination and exploitation that all of us might think are normative fixtures of our world. Right. That we just go about as an arab woman. I think, for example, to say, right, theres these things that become normative fixtures our everyday life. But you sort of bring us back to saying what are the that have constructed these relational processes that rely on domination and exploitation. And so thats the entry point from my own work. The other thing that i find really fascinating because i do psychometric around liberation struggles, conditions of freedom and sort liberating oneself, being a part of that is a call from the book to divest psychically also from the central city of these modes of relating being the only way to relate. And so when i was thinking about that always draw maybe this is the clinician in me or just how i think i always draw from sort of everyday experience says because it sort of brings it right back and concretize it. And so one of the i dont live in washington dc and s