Revolutionaries have long wanted to abolish the family. Marx didn’t see it surviving the eradication of capitalism. The radical feminist Shulamith Firestone viewed it as the root of all gendered oppression, imagining in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex a world of test-tube babies and (less well-remembered) chosen families, entered and dissolved at will.

FULL SURROGACY NOW: FEMINISM AGAINST FAMILY by Sophie Lewis Verso, 224 pp., $26.95

In a new book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, queer feminist theorist and geographer Sophie Lewis revives such calls. Though the family is where most people seek solace from the world as we know it, she argues that it also upholds the forces that send us in search of relief. Like Marx and Engels, she posits that the family fuels capitalism by inducting successive generations into hierarchy, and like Firestone, she accuses it of inculcating gender inequality. Most pointedly, she argues that the institution turns our most intimate relationships into commodities, framing children as something like property: private investments in the future that belong only to the people who made them.

To dismantle capitalism, Lewis argues that we need “gestational communism”—a world in which babies are “universally thought of as anybody and everybody’s responsibility, ‘belonging’ to nobody,” and in which baby-making is “distributed and made to realize collective needs and desires.” In such a future, biological kinship would be replaced by devotion to “kith and kind,” and we would finally see that we are all responsible for one another.

Making this case for a family-free utopia today is far from easy. In the Trump era, surrogacy has become a kind of symbol for patriarchal oppression. After the election, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale surged up best-seller lists to become the most-read book of 2017, according to Amazon data. In the novel, Christian fundamentalist oligarchs have taken over America and forced fertile women to act as surrogates, by raping them and compelling them to bear their children. For a new generation of readers, the requisition of the handmaids’ wombs quickly came to represent attacks on women’s agency writ large, particularly in attempts to restrict abortion access. For the pro-choice protestors who storm state capitals dressed in red handmaid habits, the concept of surrogacy has come to stand in for all this unfreedom.

If surrogacy seems inherently dystopian, Lewis argues, it’s because we haven’t tried to imagine a world in which surrogates give their services freely, from a position of equality. Today’s surrogacy industry promotes the idea that surrogates are not real workers, but poor women who have few other options. Lewis examines how Dr. Nayna Patel, the mediagenic founder of the celebrated Akanksha Infertility Clinic in Anand, India, frames surrogacy as a route out of poverty for unskilled women, a jobs program where they busy their hands learning “embroidery, machine-sewing, computing, candle-craft, and beauty treatments” while they wait for the leases on their uteruses to run out.