Revolutionary Loving
As it’s St Valentine’s Day, I thought it only appropriate to write on the subject of love. I’m sure some of you will probably accuse me of being a cynical old bastard whose concern lies more with the fact that he’s currently not getting laid than a serious political interest. Nonetheless, I’d like to revisit the concept of love as it was used by Latin American revolutionaries from the 1950s to the 1970s as a means of critique of what love has come to mean in today’s society and what it can mean in the context of capitalism. Love, even in popular conceptions, would seem to be anathema to capitalism. How could something that is based on altruism and which exists beyond material value coexist with a system that puts a material value on everything and which treats personal success as its highest goal? Why, when we live in a system like this does St Valentine’s Day remain such a large event, with millions of pounds being spent on gifts, cards, chocolate, and novelty condoms?
Paulo Freire wrote in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
The oppressor is in solidarity with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor – when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality in its praxis.
Che Guevara once said, “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”
The love that is being spoken of by these two thinkers is not the “I love you” of Valentine’s day, or the “I was in love with her,” rather it refers back to an earlier conception of love: that found in the New Testament. The love of “love thy neighbour” or “God’s love.” I would like suggest that there are, in fact, two distinct forms of love, one of which exists as an object, the other of which as a process. This distinction is exactly the reason we ask “have you ever been in love?” rather than “have you ever loved?” We wish to refer to this love-object rather than love as a process, as a dynamic. The love of “love thy neighbour” can never be, in itself, complete. The love-process cannot, and never will, be an ideal, rather it is tied to affecting the actuality of society.
Now, as I have said love in its popular conception seems to be in contradiction to capitalism. The reality, though, is that it is not. There is no object that can, in itself, resist being subsumed by the world of capital. The close analogy here is that of man. Man, in every sense of striving for his own good, would seem to contradict the system of capitalism that at every moment demands the suppression of the ability of the majority to do this, but man as object, man objectified, cannot resist being subsumed. Only man as process, man as subject, can pose a threat to capitalism. History has shown us that seemingly radical objects do dissipate into inaction. Green industries are the latest fad, before them the hippy movement epitomises supposed liberation through commodity, and capitalism has cottoned on to the fact that objects that pose themselves as contrary to capitalism often in fact make ideal commodities. As such, it should come as no surprise to us that love as it is presented to us as the object that appears altruistic and beyond material manifestation sells like hot cakes.
The use of this Christian conception of love for revolutionary rhetoric is peculiar to Latin American politics, itself heavily entwined with the liberation theology movement. That being said, what we are talking about here is a notion that allows us to engage with the humanity that we fight for, and it is a term that I’d like to embrace. Frankly that’s about the only thing I’ll be getting to embrace this Valentine’s Day. Extracted from its theological basis, love-process can be nothing but materialist. It cannot engage with society on anything other than a material level. In a counter-intuitive step, it was capitalism that ripped what was material away from reality, giving it the status of an ideal, as an object, to emasculate its very materiality so as to make it acceptable, saleable, and even popular. We should be looking back to love as a critical concept, rather than as the uncritical one that the market serves up to us.
I don’t purport to be a theologian, but maybe the re-engagement with the process of love for the sake of revolution would be more in line with the old Christian Saint Valentine. A day to celebrate that would, in my book, be far less worthy of scorn than today’s reality.
Reader Comments
Great idea. Also clever to write this article for Valentine’s Day.
Love’s connection with modern day revolutionaries (as opposed to Jesus) and revolution, was a revelation and stunning to me – I didn’t know those quotes and it’s something I’ve never thought of. It’s left me feeling quite heartened.
This is very interesting — it really made me see it differently, especially after being in the shops full of mass-produced red roses in cellophane grown by farmers paid a pittance in Kenya, using scarce water that’s much needed to grow food. Funny kind of love.
I just have one small issue with this piece, which is the use of the generic ‘man’, when ‘human’ or ‘human being’ or ‘person’ would be more accurate and less confusing — and would include all of us.
It is also worthwhile to remember that the English language has only one word for love and that to define the love we mean we have to qualify the word. This leads to many misinterpritations. The Greeks have a least four verbs to describe the state of love ( brotherly, love of god, erotic love, love of another, being the major ones) So maybe the English speaking community is restricted by it’s language as well as its thought processes, or are they intertwined?
Very good artical.
Very interesting piece. To add to Julia’s criticism I would like to say I resent the use of the word ‘emasculate’ to mean, stripped of all that is worthy, or that the writer deems worthy, to make it (materiality) ‘acceptable, saleable, or even popular.’ Masculinity is most certainly not intrinsically worthy; even less can it be used interchangeably with the term.
I’m not being funny here, but that’s the common usage of “emasculate”. I’m not doing anything new by using it in this way, and if you care that much about the politics of sex then you’d probably do better to spend your time debating the realities of oppression rather than etymology.
Yes, it kind of reminds me of those endlessly boring discussions about how the word anti-semite is ‘wrong’ because arabs are semites too. The point is that the cultural meaning of a word can – and often does – diverge from its etimological routes. Thus radical orginally meant ‘having roots’ yet it came in the 18ith and 19th century to connote a particular part of the Birtish political spectrum, and came in the twentieth century to be used more broadly as a kind of political adjective.