Love

[redflag32]

Anyone got any good links or references for the marxist opinion of Love and relationships. I came across a philosophy book on love which got me thinking on the Marxist position regarding it,its something ive never came across and would like to learn more.

[tolstoyevski]

Here's Kollontai:

Red Love (http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/red-love/index.htm)
Great Love (http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1929/great/index.htm)

[redflag32]

Many thanks!

[Janus]

Relationships in general:

Marital relations (http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/theses-morality.htm)

Sexual relations and class struggle (http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/sex-class-struggle.htm)

On Marriage (http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1904/condel/index.htm)

Socialism and Marriage (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/shaw/works/guide3.htm)

Family relations (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1932/1932-family.htm)

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

i was thinking earlier whether or not you could apply the labour theory of value to love, i think you probably can

[gilhyle]

I think what you can do is develop a sociology of the concept of love which identifies classical capitalism as the high point in the development of the concept of romantic love and which differentiates it from the relationship concepts which are articulated in other modes of production and widely translated as concepts of 'love' in capitalist society and which also relates it to the religious concept of the relationship between a God and 'his' people.

Never seen any of this done.

[jaycee]

my own thinking on this is that love as with sexual pleasure, in it's present state is merely a subconscious attempt to regain the more general feelings of pleasure and love felt during early childhood. This is a 'love' which is felt as a oneness of the self and the environment, what Freud called the 'oceanic state'. This isn't meant to belittle sex or love but to see that it is only one particulaly strong form of pleasure. For example I think when you study animals they seem to derive as much pleasure out of eating as they do from sex.

Mystical traditions have all attempted to regain this state of consciousness on a higher level, by combining it with the gains made through growing up. This is part of the truth behind ideas of God (which may be inadequate, but is still an attempt to portray something which is extremely difficult, if not impossible to do) that this sense of oneness with your environment etc is a feeling of 'love for God'.

Communsim is the historical fulfillment of this, of mankind (as oppossed to the purely individual vision given by mystical traditions) as such it will represent a 'return on a higher level' as Marx put it, to the paradisal satte of the early history of mankind.

[gilhyle]

This might have a lot of truth in it but for the word 'merely'.....what greater ambition could there be than to revisit the bliss of childhood union with the other...particularly when revisited as a second state, as a state framed by the adult consciousness and still existing ?

[jaycee]

the word merely did not mean to play down this aim (i actually would say this the highest aim there is) but rather to see that love is 'merely' a part of this desire and is not the accomplishement of this desire in itself.

[gilhyle]

OK ...I guess like all the really fundamental desires, there is no option of 'mere' accomplishment

[coda]

What is love anyway, does anybody love anybody anyway?

circa 1985 Howard Jones (Unfortunately)

[anarchista feminista]

Join the Resistance: Fall in Love
Falling in love is the ultimate act of revolution, of resistance to today's tedious, socially restrictive, culturally constrictive, humanly meaningless world.

Love transforms the world. Where the lover formerly felt boredom, he now feels passion. Where she once was complacent, she now is excited and compelled to self-asserting action. The world which once seemed empty and tiresome becomes filled with meaning, filled with risks and rewards, with majesty and danger. Life for the lover is a gift, an adventure with the highest possible stakes; every moment is memorable, heartbreaking in its fleeting beauty. When he falls in love, a man who once felt disoriented, alienated, and confused will know exactly what he wants. Suddenly his existence will make sense to him; suddenly it becomes valuable, even glorious and noble, to him. Burning passion is an antidote that will cure the worst cases of despair and resigned obedience.

Love makes it possible for individuals to connect to others in a meaningful way—it impels them to leave their shells and risk being honest and spontaneous together, to come to know each other in profound ways. Thus love makes it possible for them to care about each other genuinely, rather than at the end of the gun of Christian doctrine. But at the same time, it plucks the lover out of the routines of everyday life and separates her from other human beings. She will feel a million miles away from the herd of humanity, living as she is in a world entirely different from theirs.

In this sense love is subversive, because it poses a threat to the established order of our modern lives. The boring rituals of workday productivity and socialized etiquette will no longer mean anything to a man who has fallen in love, for there are more important forces guiding him than mere inertia and deference to tradition. Marketing strategies that depend upon apathy or insecurity to sell the products that keep the economy running as it does will have no effect upon him. Entertainment designed for passive consumption, which depends upon exhaustion or cynicism in the viewer, will not interest him.

There is no place for the passionate, romantic lover in today's world, business or private. For he can see that it might be more worthwhile to hitchhike to Alaska (or to sit in the park and watch the clouds sail by) with his sweetheart than to study for his calculus exam or sell real estate, and if he decides that it is, he will have the courage to do it rather than be tormented by unsatisfied longing. He knows that breaking into a cemetery and making love under the stars will make for a much more memorable night than watching television ever could. So love poses a threat to our consumer-driven economy, which depends upon consumption of (largely useless) products and the labor that this consumption necessitates to perpetuate itself.

Similarly, love poses a threat to our political system, for it is difficult to convince a man who has a lot to live for in his personal relationships to be willing to fight and die for an abstraction such as the state; for that matter, it may be difficult to convince him to even pay taxes. It poses a threat to cultures of all kinds, for when human beings are given wisdom and valor by true love they will not be held back by traditions or customs which are irrelevant to the feelings that guide them.

Love even poses a threat to our society itself. Passionate love is ignored and feared by the bourgeoisie, for it poses a great danger to the stability and pretense they covet. Love permits no lies, no falsehoods, not even any polite half-truths, but lays all emotions bare and reveals secrets which domesticated men and women cannot bear. You cannot lie with your emotional and sexual response; situations or ideas will excite or repel you whether you like it or not, whether it is polite or not, whether it is advisable or not. One cannot be a lover and a (dreadfully) responsible, (dreadfully) respectable member of today's society at the same time; for love will impel you to do things which are not "responsible" or "respectable." True love is irresponsible, irrepressible, rebellious, scornful of cowardice, dangerous to the lover and everyone around her, for it serves one master alone: the passion that makes the human heart beat faster. It disdains anything else, be it self-preservation, obedience, or shame. Love urges men and women to heroism, and to antiheroism—to indefensible acts that need no defense for the one who loves.

For the lover speaks a different moral and emotional language than the typical bourgeois man does. The average bourgeois man has no overwhelming, smoldering desires. Sadly, all he knows is the silent despair that comes of spending his life pursuing goals set for him by his family, his educators, his employers, his nation, and his culture, without ever being able to even consider what needs and wants he might have of his own. Without the burning fire of desire to guide him, he has no criteria upon which to choose what is right and wrong for himself. Consequently he is forced to adopt some dogma or doctrine to direct him through his life. There are a wide variety of moralities to choose from in the marketplace of ideas, but which morality a man buys into is immaterial so long as he chooses one because he is at a loss otherwise as to what he should do with himself and his life. How many men and women, having never realized that they had the option to choose their own destinies, wander through life in a dull haze thinking and acting in accordance with the laws that have been taught to them, merely because they no longer have any other idea of what to do? But the lover needs no prefabricated principles to direct her; her desires identify what is right and wrong for her, for her heart guides her through life. She sees beauty and meaning in the world, because her desires paint the world in these colors. She has no need for dogmas, for moral systems, for commandments and imperatives, for she knows what to do without instructions.

Thus she does indeed pose quite a threat to our society. What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their "responsibilities" and "common sense," and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be! Certainly it would be different than it is now—and it is quite a truism that people from the "mainstream," the simultaneous keepers and victims of the status quo, fear change.

And so, despite the stereotyped images used in the media to sell toothpaste and honeymoon suites, genuine passionate love is discouraged in our culture. Being "carried away by your emotions" is frowned upon; instead we are raised to always be on our guard lest our hearts lead us astray. Rather than being encouraged to have the courage to face the consequences of risks taken in pursuit of our hearts' desires, we are counseled not to take risks at all, to be "responsible." And love itself is regulated. Men must not fall in love with other men, nor women with other women, nor individuals from different ethnic backgrounds with each other, or else the usual bigots who form the front-line offensive in the assault of modern Western culture upon the individual will step in. Men and women who have already entered into a legal/religious contract with each other are not to fall in love with anyone else, even if they no longer feel any passion for their marital partner. Love as most of us know it today is a carefully prescribed and preordained ritual, something that happens on Friday nights in expensive movie theaters and restaurants, something that fills the pockets of the shareholders in the entertainment industries without preventing workers from showing up to the office on time and ready to reroute phone calls all day long. This regulated, commercial "love" is nothing like the passionate, burning love that consumes the genuine lover. These restrictions, expectations, and regulations smother true love; for love is a wild flower that can never grow within the confines prepared for it but only appears where it is least expected.

We must fight against these cultural restraints that would cripple and smother our desires. For it is love that gives meaning to life, desire that makes it possible for us to make sense of our existence and find purpose in our lives. Without these, there is no way for us to determine how to live our lives, except to submit to some authority, to some god, master or doctrine that will tell us what to do and how to do it without ever giving us the satisfaction that self-determination does. So fall in love today, with men, with women, with music, with ambition, with yourself. . . with life!

One might say that it is ridiculous to implore others to fall in love—one either falls in love or one does not, it is not a choice that can be made consciously. Emotions do not follow the instructions of the rational mind. But the environment in which we must live out our lives has a great influence on our emotions, and we can make rational decisions that will affect this environment. It should be possible to work to change an environment that is hostile to love into an environment that will encourage it. Our task must be to engineer our world so that it is a world in which people can and do fall in love, and thus to reconstitute human beings so that we will be ready for the "revolution" spoken of in these pages—so that we will be able to find meaning and happiness in our lives.

What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their "responsibilities" and "common sense," and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be!




Crimethinc. link (http://www.crimethinc.com/library/english/join.html)

[Black Dagger]

Originally posted by [email protected] 06, 2007 07:39 am
Anyone got any good links or references for the marxist opinion of Love and relationships. I came across a philosophy book on love which got me thinking on the Marxist position regarding it,its something ive never came across and would like to learn more.
Anarchist... not a marxist... but Emma Goldmans essay 'marriage and love' is a classic on this subject:

http://134.173.117.152/Anarchist_Archives/...ageandlove.html (http://134.173.117.152/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/aando/marriageandlove.html)

"Free love? As if love is anything but free!"

[gilhyle]

Im tempted to argue the opposite of Emma Goldman:

Marriage as an economic arrangement will one day stand alone without the need of the facade of 'love', that myth that potential partners in marriage are pressured to impose on each other; on that day the concept of love will break down into its elements - the passion of infatuation, the narcisism that relies on monogamy and the soldarity of long term comradeship. If anything proves left over we will then, and maybe only then, find out if 'love' ever actually meant anything.

[Dominick]

Capitalism distorts love in such a way that it become visible to humanity as a scarce commodity, creating jealousy and controlling realtionships. In a communist society, I imagine that love will not have the constraints of monogamy upon it, allowing it to be valid for a person to be in love with any number of individuals and form whatever sort of relationships that make them happy.

[redflag32]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19, 2007 05:31 am
Capitalism distorts love in such a way that it become visible to humanity as a scarce commodity, creating jealousy and controlling realtionships. In a communist society, I imagine that love will not have the constraints of monogamy upon it, allowing it to be valid for a person to be in love with any number of individuals and form whatever sort of relationships that make them happy.

I do certainly think you can love many people, i may love my mam my dad and my son,but the love for the opposite sex which may just be lust (still undecided) should in my opinion be restricted to one person. I know the argument that jealousy is a function of the ego but i still think it would be disrespectfull to Love/lust more than one person at a time,unless ofcourse they agreed,then theres the argument of is it good for our species.

This topic really gets my brain fried.LOL. there have been some really good opinions on this thread and i thank you for this, My real problem with this is if love is mysticism or is it real. I am not a mystic but i believe i have been in love before. Am i confusing love with lust? Should humans be able to go through life alone or are we better off as a species to link up with others for life?

Most of what we consider love is just emotive responses to past experiences i think, we have been programmed to go for a certain individual aswell,i certainly dont believe the misconception that there is one person out there for you. I believe i am abe to fall in "love" and make a life with many people,probaly thousands,then there are those i wouldntbe able because of differences in personality, i dont think you can love someone unless you are capable of being alone,if you rely on someone else for your happyness how can that be love? If you demand they make you happy what comes next is fear of loss,losing this crutch. If love is based on this it isnt love,its clinging.

Did Marx have a view on this at all,or on the family? Sorry for my ignorance but its a section of Marx ive never looked into properly.