The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value - Richard Gilman-Opalsky Audiobook
Language: EnglishKeywords:
Capitalism
Commodification
Communism
Economics
Love
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Exploring the meanings and powers of love from ancient Greece to the present day, Richard Gilman-Opalsky argues that what is called “love” by the best thinkers who have approached the subject is in fact the beating heart of communism - understood as a way of living, not as a form of government. Along the way, he reveals with clarity that the capitalist way of assigning value to things is incapable of appreciating what humans value most. Capitalism cannot value the experiences and relationships that make our lives worth living and can only destroy love by turning it into a commodity. The Communism of Love follows the struggles of love in different contexts of race, class, gender, and sexuality and shows how the aspiration for love is as close as we may get to a universal communist aspiration.
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| Creation Date: | Tue, 28 Dec 2021 13:18:06 +0100 |
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This post has 17 comments
December 28th, 2021
Narrated by ….. Bea Flowers
Length ……….. 14h 51m
audible.com/pd/The-Communism-of-Love-Audiobook/B09MV5ZXH9
December 28th, 2021
Love in the gulag. Murder on the dancefloor - you’d better not kill the kulaks.
December 28th, 2021
CHAPTER 1: THE LOGIC OF LOVE AS A COMMUNIST POWER
“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked. On the contrary this adds to its beauty.” —Simone Weil, Waiting on God
—
This epigraph sounds and feels more like an innovative remake of the infamous political excuse of the Soviets “One can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” (*), referring to multiple of victims of marxist-socialist-communist ideology (**)
(*) meaning “it is impossible to achieve something important without there being some bad effects”
(**) hence the famous Orwell’s question: “So, where’s the omelette?”
Let’s try to remake the above epigraph accordingly, and see if the pure transcendental beauty is still there:
“The country is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes millions of non-compliant countrymen and mere bystanders are murdered by the ideologue state. On the contrary this adds to its beauty.”
December 28th, 2021
correction: referring to multiple victims…
December 28th, 2021
The man isn’t wrong. All functional family units are communist. It only seems to really break down into an authoritarian nightmare once you get more than about 75 people involved. Which is why certain fundamentalist religious communities intentionally divide once they get over about 75 people. Is this related to the fact that about one in one hundred people is a power hungry, amoral sociopath? Don’t have the data on that, but its certainly an interesting correlation.
December 28th, 2021
@caesar963 props on knowing who the kulaks were. Russian history is both fascinating and neglected, at least in my country.
@alnilam well said, unfortunately unregulated capitalism isn’t much better. Regulated capitalism is, but our oligarchs won’t let us have that, in the US anyway. Leading to the rise of populism with all the problems that ultimately leads to. Democracy, capitalism, socialism and probably even communism can theoretically work at scale, but they all require diligent supervision from a dedicated, cynical and yet still engaged population. Once that is lost every system merely elevates the most vile among humanity to positions of control. Democratic capitalism just takes longer to get there, and is therefore considered to be better. But looking at the state of the US now, we seem to have almost reached that end point here.
December 28th, 2021
Isn’t he merely presenting a false dichotomy again? Yet more reductionism, ever the case with these toxic, broken ideologies. Also, the tendency to scour history & life’s rich phenomena, finding positive features, and then falsely co-opting them for sinister, ideological purposes. Planting blood-red flags in ‘em.
Many families can indeed be authoritarian, of course.
I think the founding fathers over there reckoned democratic/civic republicanism would work at the level of the thirteen states. More than that, and it gets unwieldy (Greece & Rome being the models).
December 28th, 2021
Awesome. Thank you!
December 28th, 2021
@alnilam You are probably just trolling, but this book isn’t appologizing for the Soviet Union. It is published by AK Press, the anarchist publisher. Richard Gilman-Opalsky is an autonomist marxist. Two groups of people who are actually critical of State Communism and not just pro-Capitalist/Fascist.
December 29th, 2021
I’ll let the author comment on what the author meant rather than attempting to do it myself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ3AeRYjgV4
With that said, my claims with regards to him being correct that functional families are communist tracks with the claims he claims to be making. So unless he’s lying about the content of his book, which I don’t rule out in this day and age, I stand by the statement that he’s not wrong with regard to functional families being communist. As he puts it, do families condition feeding babies, or children, on their providing labor? Now or in the future? In the west, at least, the answer is typically no.
Families can certainly be authoritarian, which is why I added the “functional” qualifier. I don’t consider an authoritarian family to be functional. I hate authoritarians of whatever stripe.
December 29th, 2021
@boneswithfiddle The greatest trick the capitalist propaganda machine ever pulled was framing the entire question of the economic organization of our society on a false dichotomy between Pinochet and Pol Pot. Very few capitalist apologists will acknowledge that left-anarchism/libertarian socialism even exists.
December 29th, 2021
Yeah, but we’re still taking a sui generis unit like the family, and expediently projecting what is a failed ideology onto it. Because, as per the false dichotomy, it can only ever be one thing or the other. We can speculate that for the majority of families throughout history, a major motivation was/is that the kids are gonna look after us, in our elderly 30s.
Aside from that, while we all hopefully agree now that the family is broadly a good thing, and has worked extraordinarily well, what again was the Marxist plan for the family - just as a matter of interest?
The ideology, in all of its evidenced iterations, has always been authoritarian. It has that in common with authoritarian, abusive, exploitative families. And dystopian sf.
December 29th, 2021
And yes, erouting, I appreciate that you oppose authoritarianism, & represent yourself in good faith. I’m only arguing the ideas.
December 30th, 2021
You could certainly make that argument with regard to children looking after their parents, until roughly the 70s in the US, the present in China and most oriental countries and I’m not sure when in Europe. The end point of that discussion usually is a disagreement about whether kin selection, as with uncles and extended family members helping with child rearing but not getting taken care of in old age, still has market value based on ensuring genetic survival. If you have a different end point please share it. The three times I’ve had that debate that’s where it ends.
I think we may be using the term ‘communism’ differently. In the US its used (incorrectly I will readily admit) to refer to doing anything, without direct and maximum monetary reward, that benefits anyone who isn’t rich. This has lead many (probably most) of us to use the term “communism” not in the Marxist sense, but in the etymological root sense: “communis” which Google Translate tells me means “for the community.”
So when I say that families are communist, I don’t mean that they round up their women and place them in breeding camps, or that they have home school programs that dictate life outcomes based on aptitude tests for all children. I mean that they often hold property in common, expend that property for the common benefit and do not expect direct monetary remuneration for doing so.
‘Communist,’ along with ’socialist’ has been used as a red herring in the US since the fall of the Russian Empire. As a result of that I think we’ve had a lot of linguistic drift that may not be reflected in other countries that are less propagandized than we are.
Communist or communism in the US refers, depending on who you ask, to everything. Including all forms of government assistance, pension funds, disability insurance, seat belt and helmet laws, home owners associations, the media, anyone who isn’t a republican and/or a libertarian, the draft, the teaching of foreign languages or history in primary school, the existence of public schools, the existence of any non-privatized government program, the theory of evolution, health insurance, the Post Office, student loans, any regulation on free markets whatsoever as well as any government agency that supervises said regulation, trade unions, collective bargaining when said bargaining doesn’t benefit wealthy corporations, and various forms of wildlife including the Teletubies and badgers (because they collectively raise young. Badgers. Not the Teletubies.) There are many, many more things that Americans have improperly called communist, but I think you get the point.
If you didn’t read all that, which would be perfectly reasonable considering its length, the key takeaway is that Americans have called both Teletubbies and badgers communists and meant it, like, they were totally serious.
Eventually, when everything you believe to be right, good and proper, gets labeled with a red herring you kind of adopt it and change the meaning to fit common usage and your own needs. So given that I’m from the US and this author is from the US I think we may have a cultural false equivelancy here wherein what we think of when the word communist is used (all manner of beneficial support programs, the post office, and everything else Republicans have wrongly used the term to refer to) isn’t what non-Americans think of when they hear that same word. Like when I hear the term communist in my day to day life its probably a Republican complaining about a food assistance program, or that the 9th circuit ruled that cities can’t arrest people for being homeless anymore, or something similarly daft. So when I read this book’s description and listen to the author talk about his work, my take away was “Oh, he means that families take care of each other and are fairly selfless about it, yeah, that’s true.”
If he’s actually saying that families are marxist ideology in minature then he’s wrong and I agree with you.
Communism as a political ideology is definitely a failure, unregulated capitalism also seems to be a failure, though it does seem to have a lower death count of white people (the only death count that matters to most Americans) thus far and is therefore superior to communism. If ‘communism’ hasn’t shifed outside the US as it has within the US then no, families aren’t communist and it is inaccurate to call them that.
I agree that its not possible to encapsulate all family units under a single definition, to clarify, both my undergrad psych training and my own life experience have convinced me that a functional and healthy family often includes elements of what we, Americans, would call communism with regard to the sharing of property, time, labor, etc. I’ll certainly debate that with you. That said, I would prefer to avoid a debate arising out of the lack of a common definition for the term under consideration. So if one of the first things that comes to mind when someone calls someone else a communist isn’t “Oh, he must support free school lunches or something.” then we’re probably talking about different things.
December 30th, 2021
Badgers have only themselves to blame. They’re extremely aggressive & even engage in dominance dances. Moreover, they’re known to kick the shyte out of cobras, wolves, bears & lions. They’re also very dangerous when you charge them, to the extent that I hardly do it anymore. Particularly during lockdown.
Having kids in the context of future security, I reckon that remains one of the prevalent motives. Motivation is enormously complex, of course (not being alone - diversity of family types, etc.) - that’s why reductionism, particularly ideological reductionism, falls apart.
Yeah, we’re not talking about a monolithic structure.
I like the way Americans use the terms in inventive ways, it’s more colourful. You also have Americans who self-label as somewhere on the socialist/communist spectrum who, when asked, will identify billionaire entrepreneurs (& regular entrepreneurs) as their role models. So, confusion is rife.
Probably best to go with the objective, neutral, dictionary definition of terms. When in doubt, as ’twere.
You could tell the doods who don’t favour any regulation on free markets that we’ve never had completely unregulated markets. That’s another red herring, deployed by many actors.
Voluntarism, community & charity, inter alia, are some of the many goods which predate ideological communism. Republican types probably approve of these forms of activity.
I have an aversion for every manifestation of extreme political snake oil & empire-building - Marxism/nat socialism, & all the rest. There is significant hostility towards the family in Marxism, of course. The argument is that the “apparatus” of the family is a break on “the revolution” & acts as a unit of consumption, teaching passive acceptance of hierarchy. It’s also the institution through which the wealthy convey their private property to their children, thus reproducing class inequality. Hierarchy in the family prefigures the boss hierarchy in the factory, they tediously go on. The family is criticised in the same manner as the media & education.
So, a bit of an inherent contradiction again. As usual, Marxism is overly deterministic.
Many families, arising from religious principle, reject consumerism & materialism as being wholly vacuous. But Marxism cannot comprehend religion.
Marxism ignores family diversity. Also, inequalities exist within all families, irrespective of social class background.
Marxism ignores the benefits of the family e.g. both parents support the children. The family is found in societies around the world & throughout history, suggesting it is something that people choose, as it works.
Another major problem I have with these extreme “isms” is their need to misappropriate from life & history any good features, fraudulently claiming them for ideological reasons. It’s a glib, dishonest, entirely artificial exercise - to colonise the truly valuable for some broken, failed, toxic ideological “wasm” that performed its catastrophic damage during the 20th century dark age. The bloody twentieth.
December 30th, 2021
> Communism as a political ideology is definitely a failure, unregulated capitalism also seems to be a failure…
It seems in essence it always comes down to “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (”Who will guard the guardians?”) — combined with unchecked political power, human nature being what it is, slowly, gradually allows more things based on moral relativism, and vice versa — leading to corruption, corrosion and destruction of existing functional political and societal institutions and structures — hence the cycle “Hard times create strong men — strong men create good times — good times create weak men — weak men create hard times”.
December 30th, 2021
One of the many mistakes: I should have said “brake” rather than “break” on “the revolution”
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