Morning Comrades.
With the expected but nevertheless gut-wrenching reality of being bombarded with advertising, subsequent expectations and pressures in regards to one of Capitalism’s most nastiest made up days, Valentines Day, I wanted to dig a little deeper into this idea of love, love under capitalism and what, if any, ideas exist within the Marxist framework around this most personal of affairs - it’s anything but personal but one thought at the time.
Today’s dispatch goes out to everyone as part of the changed publishing schedule. The rest of the week will be for the patreons of this newsletter as last week and a quick thank you to everyone that signed up to support this old person and their work. It’s seen and greatly appreciated. Here is the link to a free 14 day trial for you to consider.
Before we start. There is a significant cultural background to Valentines Day, it goes back to the 5th Century here in Europe and whilst that part of its history is interesting and certainly worth a quick read, what it is and how it is “celebrated” today is rubbish. A very basic Marxist and quite frankly logical analysis thereof is that it encapsulates the manufactured patriarchal hierarchy structures in relationship to production/consumption and on that basis alone needs and is rejected. Obviously, there is a 80 year deep feminist marxists analysis in existence that we might tap into briefly and this is most definitely worth your time.
But let’s take a few steps back and talk about love, what it is and how such a personal, psychological and biological construct can, if at all, be analyzed through a Marxist lense. Historical, cultural and even evolutionary evidence suggests love existed during ancient times and across many parts of the world. Romantic love has been found to exist in 147 of 166 cultures looked at in one study. Love is an emotion that keeps people bonded and committed to one another. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, love evolved to keep the parents of children together long enough for them to survive and reach sexual maturity. Love exists and numerous shapes and forms, cognitively and evolves, or rather changes depending on a persons nurture, age, socialization and thereon. There are a few studies I came across that aimed at adding a biological, neurological facet to this also but truth be told, I started reading and realized I am not a biological scientist. From what I gathered, our brain reacts differently to various interpretations of love but again, the science went over my head. Predominately, I would argue that love is a nurtured necessity to our biological survival. It’s also bloody nice to be in love and be loved. Without wanting to tap too deep into my romantic side, here is what Che Guevara had to say about it and what perfectly summarizes my own feelings:
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality […] We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.”
So how, if at all, does Marxism come into this equation? Obviously, the study of Marxism is at its core founded on dialectic materialism, a tool to study ones surroundings and change them accordingly, for the greater good of humanity, but love and materialism?
Absolutely, and simply put, love is an emotion that drives humans to materially impact their environment and thus themselves. It furthermore is then utilized, one could argue, abused, in the course of western history to be manifested in marriage, and thus the idea of the patriarchal hierarchy structures necessary for capitalism to maximise its profit structures. Uff. Dry as fuck, I know, but that’s the core of it. If we delve a little deeper, considers the emergence of a concept of sex love ( I’ll get that awkward phrase shortly ) out of the debate between Hegelian idealism and philosophical materialism that develops in and around Marx’s early writings and his engagement with Feuerbach.
In these early philosophical and critical writings, Marx seeks to elaborate a practice that moves away from philosophy and towards a discourse that would properly understand human labor and activity as the pragmatic foundation of man’s being in the world. Though Marx appears to represent a break with the project of philosophy at the point at which he elaborates his eleven theses on Feuerbach, these early inquiries form the foundation of the dialectical materialism that occupies so much of his later political and social writing, and serve as the backbone for the economic theories developed in Capital. In order to achieve a materialism that trumped the innovations of Hegelian idealism, it was necessary that Marx (and Engels), as Plekhanov notes, address the “subjective side of man” and “know how to give a materialist explanation to all sides of human life” “if it does not wish to betray its own principle and constantly return to idealist outlooks; if it does not wish to recognize idealism as stronger in a definite sphere.” It is necessary that Marx and Engels work through materialism to an account of the seemingly immaterial and subjective experiences of man, to account for their sensuous activity.1
In The Holy Family, Marx defends from the Critical Criticism crowd the notion of love. Perhaps most interested in rejecting Feuerbachian notions of love in the defense of their own Hegelian mode of navel-gazing transcendental and misguided idealism, the Critical Critics “must first seek to dispose of love. Love is a passion, and nothing is more dangerous for the calm of knowledge than passion,” Marx snarks. Indeed, it is the fact that love is “sensually manifest” — flying in the face of the Hegelian “polemic against the evil ‘This’” — that it is “not even content with turning man into the category ‘Object’ for another man, it even makes out of him a definite, real object, this evil-individual…external object which does not remain internal, hidden in the brain.”
In this way, love for Marx is sex love, in that it is located in and of the body, not the ideology of love as historically produced, as Engels later delineates the ideology of love in The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State, and Marx describes in Capital, Volume 1.
Marx argues gleefully that “love is an un-Critical, un-christian materialist.” In this, the concept of love is capable of doing the labor of materialism: loving is an activity that ratifies the real individual in the historically conditioned and practically existing world. As Feuerbach claims in The Essence of Christianity, “love is materialism; immaterial love is a chimaera.” There is a tangible, sensuous reality to love, and all of the senses as “social organs” — “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving — in short, all the organs of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form, are in their objective approach or in their approach to the object the appropriation of that object.
This appropriation of human reality, their approach to the object, is the confirmation of human reality.” The development and engagement of the senses, which include the “practical senses” of “(will, love, etc.)” “come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature” and are thus activities, “human relations to the world” that are materially constitutive of man’s species-being.
To love is, like Feuerbach, to “mak[e] the social relation between ‘man and man’ the basic principle” of one’s presence in the material world inasmuch as it actively posits the relationship between men.” This sensuous engagement with the world is the way in which the world is self-constituting, and manifests Feuerbach’s “true materialism and real science” by way of rejecting the abstraction of the self into the dialectical process of idealist self-positing.
So much for the deep dive into the philosophical side of it. It also strikes me entertaining, and not the funny kind, that Marxists, Communists, Socialists, Anarchists etc. are so often branded as angry, loveless, raging analysts and wrong doers when the exact opposite is true. The understanding of love within the realms of philosophy are wondrous and lie at the core of asking “why”. Additionally, it is within this world, specifically in the active part of implementing this philosophy where I have found love and have received love in ways I never thought possible. The way each and everyone of us chooses to materialize love is their decision, and not one ever to be infringed upon by theory or force, for as long as it is mutual, consensual and harm-free. With that, fuck Capitalism’s projection of love with enough passion to burn it all to the ground, but embrace love for what it is, because it is the root of all revolutions. Fall in love, not in line.
With much love for all of you,
Yours,
V.
Because “sex love” is a bit of an awkward phrase (no one sits around talking of sex love, though we may perhaps discuss our desires or lusts), and because “sex love” is the standard translation of the Engels term, I’ve maintained the use of it throughout, but italicized it in order to draw attention to its linguistic specificity.
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