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Hello and welcome to a special slaying of sacred cows edition of behind the news on the chopping block home and family.

My name is Doug Henrywood, the non-shocking only in number two segments today.

Michelle O'Brien will talk about family abolition and Jane Chung will tell us what's wrong with the American cult of homeownership.

First under the axe the family and not just the Aussie and Harriet kind, which accounts for only about a quarter of the households in the U.S. these days.

M.E. O'Brien, a sociologist, psychoanalyst and writer, has a new book called Family Abolition, Capitalism in the Communizing of Care from Pluto Press.

She's also a co-editor of two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, as it says, and Para Praxis on psychoanalysis and politics.

I'm quite happy with my family, but many people certainly aren't with theirs, and in any case my situation is no guide to what's good social policy.

O'Brien's book is a serious and rigorous overview of the origins of and problems with our family structures, and what might be better ways of organizing the intimate, physical and emotional care we need to live and live well.

Many people recoil from the phrase Family Abolition, and the concept behind it, as you will probably hear from my second question, it's something that makes me stumble.

But O'Brien's argument is worth listening to, and she delivers it very well, both on the page and over the air.

M.E. O'Brien, let's start with defining the words of your title, Family and Abolition.

What do you mean by these things? First, Family. I was just reminded of the origin of the word, because I just looked it up.

It's from the Latin word, Famulus for Servant, which is an interesting angle.

What kind of family are you talking about? What is the role that it serves?

I provide three contrasting definitions of family over the first three chapters, and all of them I engage over the course of the book.

And the first is a unit of private social reproduction.

So social reproduction theory is a major current in Marxist feminism these days, and identifies it comes out of the housework debate to the 1970s, and some Marxists thinking before then, that identifies the family as a unit in the reproduction of capitalist society.

Both the bourgeoisie and reproducing the ruling class, and working class families is reproducing the workforce.

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