Accueil
"This book is about the communism of love. It is, in other words, about the necessarily and irreducibly communist form and content of love. The chapters of this book travel far, but are held together by an overarching argument about love as a communist power. At the same time, this book is an inquiry into the poverty of exchange value. By “poverty of exchange value” I mean that the capitalist mode of assessing value is incapable of appreciating what human beings—everywhere on earth—value the most. For all of its multifarious meanings, love reveals the limits of capital to appropriately value the experiences and relationships that human beings treasure most. Yet most human life is subordinated to exchange relations. In recent decades, the logic of capital has been increasingly extended to the administration of love in ways previously unimaginable. But capital only succeeds in commodifying love by destroying it, by converting it into an impoverished “false form” (that is, a spectacle) of itself."
"I claim that love is a practice that socializes a unique polyamory beyond the structure of romantic relationship. This polyamory is not about having multiple partners, and is not primarily sexual or romantic, but is instead the polyamory of a communist affection for others. I argue that the human aspiration to love expresses a longing for a form of communist
relationality. This can be demonstrated whether or not one recognizes the communism of their own relationships."
"I argue for the desirability and practicality of a logic of human relations that is irreducibly antagonistic to capitalist exchange relations. If everyone who aspires to love aims, through that peculiar aspiration, to separate and defend their most cherished relationships from the exigencies of capital, then no capitalist totality can be fully realized. Capitalism, as
both an ideological position and as an actual power that organizes life, cannot satisfactorily encompass the psychosocial and emotional needs of everyday people.
Fourth, I argue that revolts and other disruptive social and political movements are always, at least to some extent, concerned with the creation or restoration of relations of love against a monetized life of exchange relations. In such movements—and indeed, in a wide range of global uprisings—love is often wielded as a nonmilitaristic weapon, or, rather, as a
threatening sensibility. Love activates a sensibility about being with other people that is antithetical to capitalist reasons for being-with-others."
"Martha Nussbaum, one of the most influential philosophers in the world [...] wrote a philosophy of love in Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013). Remarkably, in
her 450-page study, Nussbaum is silent on the tensions between love and capitalist exchange relations, and she thinks that Marx has nothing to contribute to her inquiry, mentioning him only once in passing. Nussbaum assumes we can pursue a politics of love that will lead to increasing justice, the latter being fully compatible with capitalism. In contrast to Nussbaum, the present study offers a refutation and rejection of both liberal and conservative conceptions of love as a force of justice within existing capitalist societies, and argues instead that love is either a communist power or it is not in fact love."
"We are trying to understand the possibility of a real collective subject that is not secondary to the individual because—among other reasons—the individual’s personality is realized only in dialectical relations with others around her. The individual is developed within that sociality, and does not precede it. But, since so many of our social relations are determined by the capitalist mode of life and work, we cannot answer the question of the collectivity with a simple sociological observation. We are not looking for a collectivity that is the determined subject position of capitalist society, but, rather, we are looking for a collectivity formed in our noncapitalist being-in-the-world, our relations to other human beings that maintain a sociality beyond and against exchange relations."
"The heart of Marx’s communist theory, from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital, is ultimately about unacceptable forms of life necessitated by capitalism. All of this, I claim, can be studied best in Grundrisse, where Marx radically rethinks and updates his insights on alienation from 1844 and builds the bridge to his major multivolume study of capital."
"The compatibilities of autonomist Marxism with anarchism are far more interesting than their oppositions, and I offer this book as a bridge, not a wall."
"There remain countless no-go zones for capitalist totalization in so many of the precarious little communes of everyday life, and those zones are often the most precious and important."
-Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love. An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, AK Press, 347 pages.
"I claim that love is a practice that socializes a unique polyamory beyond the structure of romantic relationship. This polyamory is not about having multiple partners, and is not primarily sexual or romantic, but is instead the polyamory of a communist affection for others. I argue that the human aspiration to love expresses a longing for a form of communist
relationality. This can be demonstrated whether or not one recognizes the communism of their own relationships."
"I argue for the desirability and practicality of a logic of human relations that is irreducibly antagonistic to capitalist exchange relations. If everyone who aspires to love aims, through that peculiar aspiration, to separate and defend their most cherished relationships from the exigencies of capital, then no capitalist totality can be fully realized. Capitalism, as
both an ideological position and as an actual power that organizes life, cannot satisfactorily encompass the psychosocial and emotional needs of everyday people.
Fourth, I argue that revolts and other disruptive social and political movements are always, at least to some extent, concerned with the creation or restoration of relations of love against a monetized life of exchange relations. In such movements—and indeed, in a wide range of global uprisings—love is often wielded as a nonmilitaristic weapon, or, rather, as a
threatening sensibility. Love activates a sensibility about being with other people that is antithetical to capitalist reasons for being-with-others."
"Martha Nussbaum, one of the most influential philosophers in the world [...] wrote a philosophy of love in Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013). Remarkably, in
her 450-page study, Nussbaum is silent on the tensions between love and capitalist exchange relations, and she thinks that Marx has nothing to contribute to her inquiry, mentioning him only once in passing. Nussbaum assumes we can pursue a politics of love that will lead to increasing justice, the latter being fully compatible with capitalism. In contrast to Nussbaum, the present study offers a refutation and rejection of both liberal and conservative conceptions of love as a force of justice within existing capitalist societies, and argues instead that love is either a communist power or it is not in fact love."
"We are trying to understand the possibility of a real collective subject that is not secondary to the individual because—among other reasons—the individual’s personality is realized only in dialectical relations with others around her. The individual is developed within that sociality, and does not precede it. But, since so many of our social relations are determined by the capitalist mode of life and work, we cannot answer the question of the collectivity with a simple sociological observation. We are not looking for a collectivity that is the determined subject position of capitalist society, but, rather, we are looking for a collectivity formed in our noncapitalist being-in-the-world, our relations to other human beings that maintain a sociality beyond and against exchange relations."
"The heart of Marx’s communist theory, from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital, is ultimately about unacceptable forms of life necessitated by capitalism. All of this, I claim, can be studied best in Grundrisse, where Marx radically rethinks and updates his insights on alienation from 1844 and builds the bridge to his major multivolume study of capital."
"The compatibilities of autonomist Marxism with anarchism are far more interesting than their oppositions, and I offer this book as a bridge, not a wall."
"There remain countless no-go zones for capitalist totalization in so many of the precarious little communes of everyday life, and those zones are often the most precious and important."
-Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love. An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, AK Press, 347 pages.
