[It’s not you, it’s capitalism.]
[[link removed]]

THIS VALENTINE’S DAY, LET’S LOOK TO MARXISTS TO REIMAGINE LOVE,
ROMANCE AND SEX  
[[link removed]]


 

Sarah Jaffe
February 13, 2023
In These Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ It’s not you, it’s capitalism. _

, Carmen Martínez Torrón

 

Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci has been quoted quite a lot in
recent years amid our various political catastrophes from Trump to
Covid-19 to climate collapse and the political center’s seeming
inability to resist any of the above. The most famous line from his
_Prison Notebooks_, written between 1929 and 1935 while a political
prisoner of the Mussolini regime, is probably: ​“The crisis
consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new
cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid
symptoms appear.” This is sometimes more
[[link removed](see%20below).]
loosely translated
[[link removed](see%20below).]
as ​“The old world is dying and the new cannot be born; now is the
time of monsters.” 

It’s certainly fitting to think of what Gramsci was writing from
a fascist prison in today’s political climate. But it’s also true
that we’re in another sort of interregnum, one of romance, sexuality
and gender itself. And this one comes with its very own set of morbid
symptoms, as anyone who’s tried dating lately can attest. Dating
apps are a plague, every week there seems to be a new term for bad
behavior (“ghosting
[[link removed]],”
​“breadcrumbing
[[link removed]],”
whatever), work demands more and more of our time
[[link removed]],
leaving less and less for love, and a constantly destabilized economy
leaves us anxious and stressed even if we do happen to have stable
work. Abortion is now illegal in a huge chunk of the country, and
homophobic and transphobic violence — not to mention actual bans
on trans healthcare and drag — are on the rise. And even if you
do make it to coupledom and want to have children, our country still
has precisely no support for working parents
[[link removed]]. The material basis on
which you might have thought you’d be able to build a life
is crumbling. 

If there’s one thing we can learn from Marxists in this moment,
it’s that material circumstances matter — even when it comes
to romance. Gramsci wasn’t exactly sitting in his prison cell
dishing out relationship advice — he was trying to analyze the
world that had locked him up, the capitalist system he was trying to
bring down, and its effects on human life. But in ​“Americanism
and Fordism,” one of the many pieces collected in the most commonly
published English [[link removed]]
translation of those _Prison Notebooks_, he did turn his gaze to
sexuality and relationships in order to explain how those
relationships were created and coerced by industrial capitalism. 

In this, he built on _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and
the State_, published half a century earlier by Marx’s best friend,
editor and frequent coauthor Friedrich Engels. Engels had a rather
unconventional romantic life himself. While outwardly maintaining his
bourgeois lifestyle, he never married and instead secretly cohabitated
with his working-class lover, Mary Burns (an Irish radical who deeply
influenced
[[link removed]]
his work); and after Mary died, with her sister Lizzie
[[link removed].].
In this book, he built on notes left by Marx and attempted to write
a historical materialist critique of the Victorian family — an
ultra-patriarchal household designed to consolidate and hand down
wealth and police women’s behavior, or in other words, a more
tightly controlled version of the nuclear family we still have. 

What both Gramsci and Engels point out (the latter at considerable
length) is that the family form they had been raised to think of as
normal was, in fact, a recent invention, created with some degree of
coercion and molded into ​“common sense,” a term Gramsci used
for the kinds of popular beliefs that shape our world, even when
they’re wrong. (He counterposed it to ​“good sense,” a more
accurate understanding of the forces at play in the world.)
Heterosexuality, as it existed in both men’s lifetimes, was
a particular construct of industrial capitalism, designed to suit the
needs of factory employers rather than to make people happy. A wife
at home to do the cooking, cleaning and caring sent workers off to the
factory better rested and ready for another day of work. Such
​“reproductive labor,” the Wages for Housework movement, decades
later, would note, makes husbands’ work possible.

A century’s worth of Marxist-feminists have built this understanding
into theories of housework
[[link removed]],
caring labor [[link removed]], emotional
labor [[link removed]]
and much more. They were often part of social movements demanding
radical changes to the law to accommodate vastly different
understandings of love, marriage and gender, aware that the ways we
are allowed to be and build lives together have a real effect on our
material well-being. And in turn, our material well-being has a lot
to do with how good our relationships (romantic or otherwise) are able
to be. In this, I think, there’s something to be gleaned from these
two writers that might help us navigate this moment and imagine
a better framework for love than the one that’s been handed down to
us from patriarchs past.

The reason I returned to Engels and Gramsci this Valentine’s Day is
that while this holiday is, like the nuclear family, a construct of
a particular kind of capitalism, it is a time of year where romance
is inescapable, and yet many of us wind up feeling like we’re doing
it wrong_. _In this moment, with more options for what shape
relationships might take than ever before, with fewer and fewer
[[link removed]]
people opting for the nuclear family form, especially among the
working class
[[link removed]],
there’s still plenty of social pressure to be coupled. Just look at
the increasingly frantic genre of romance reality TV (a friend of mine
referred to England’s _Love Island_
[[link removed](2015_TV_series)] as
​“_Heterosexuality Gulag_” and he’s not wrong). 

While I wouldn’t recommend reading Engels for a perfectly accurate
history of the development of the modern family, what he does do is
connect the couple form and gender roles to developments in the
economy. In other words, the form of couple we’re told is a natural
way to experience love actually developed in order to consolidate
wealth, and evolved alongside the institution of private property.
(For a modern-day and brilliant expansion on this topic, I recommend
Melinda Cooper
[[link removed]].)

Engels drew upon anthropological research among the Haudenosaunee
(Iroquois) in North America to note how the Victorian family was but
one of many options, and that the modern family had, as it were,
undergone an enclosure, consolidating control in the hands of
a patriarch. The origin of monogamy, he writes, had very little to do
with ​“the sexual love of the individual in the modern sense”;
indeed, most men had no intention of staying faithful, only of keeping
their wives so. Monogamy was in no way the highest form of love, but
rather a form of antagonism. After all, if it was simply a matter of
evolution, Engels joked, ​“then the palm belongs to the tapeworm
that carries a complete male and female sexual apparatus in each of
its 50 to 200 sections and passes its whole lifetime in fertilizing
itself in every one of its sections.” 

Rather than being natural, Engels argued, monogamy was formed based on
economic conditions: the need to pass down property. This meant that
the working classes actually had a better opportunity to find real
love, in his view, because they had no property to pass down. So
naturally, in order to keep the working classes in order, they had to
be brought into this form of the family. 

Enter Henry Ford, and Gramsci’s take on him. 

Gramsci, like Engels, found sex a worthwhile subject of inquiry, and
was particularly interested in the attempts to control and harness its
power. It was not just puritanism, he wrote, that made Ford so
interested in the sex lives of his workers that he sent inspectors
[[link removed]]
into their homes to make sure they were properly heterosexually
coupled. Increasingly rationalized, Taylorized factory work required,
Gramsci wrote, ​“a rigorous discipline of the sexual instincts,”
and ​“regulation and stability of sexual relations.” Ford was
willing to pay higher wages, but had to ensure that the workers
wouldn’t spend their extra money on booze and women. Rather, the
implication seemed, they should be putting that money into property
that they could pass down through their families.

We should probably note at this juncture that Gramsci had a rather
prudish take on these issues — he wasn’t entirely disapproving
of Ford’s methods. Certainly he, unlike Engels, did not write
glowingly of the need to liberate love from the demands of industrial
capital. But he too was clear: ​“the new industrialism wants
monogamy” because the ​“exaltation of passion cannot be
reconciled with the timed movements of productive motions connected
with the most perfected automatism.” For the working classes, both
Engels and Gramsci stress, freedom is only the freedom to sell their
time for a wage; freedom when it comes to relationships and marriage
follows the same logic. Civil law, Engels wrote, might hold that
marriage is a free contract between men and women, but the reality is
as unequal as the relationship between a worker and her employer.
This still holds up today: women still make less money
[[link removed]],
and during the pandemic we saw large numbers of women
[[link removed]]
leaving the workforce due to caring responsibilities. And the #MeToo
movement reminds us of the unequal threat faced by women who might
want to have relationships, romantic or otherwise, with men. 

Common sense says we’re all equal now; good sense includes the
realities of still-existing power relations. 

The solution, wrote Engels (and echoed by generations of liberal and
radical feminists after him), is to ​“remove the economic
considerations that now force women to submit to the customary
disloyalty of men, and you will place women on equal footing with
men.” Of course, what he meant was full communism, but he was also
interested in ​“a more unconventional intercourse of the sexes”
and the end of what we might now call slut-shaming. 

It’s worth noting that these relations are not described along
a gender binary because that’s what people recognized in Engels’s
time, but rather that these relations are what created our ideas of
men and women in the first place. Material circumstances led to
dividing people along purportedly biological lines in order to control
reproduction, and built an entire mountain of common sense about
gender on top of that seemingly simple division. 

But as the material relations that upheld and coerced binary gender
collapse, so too does binary gender and sexuality. Without jobs that
pay a family wage, women are pushed into the workplace; when that set
of tectonic plates shifts, so too does everything built upon it. The
nuclear family might have seemed like a decent deal for which to
trade other forms of freedom when its promise of economic stability
held up, but when that stability is gone, the sacrifices the nuclear
family requires no longer look terribly attractive. Binary gender very
much among them. 

This is not to say that adherents to the power relations that built
those genders and sexualities aren’t going to do everything they
possibly can to try to maintain those hierarchies. The mountain of
dating shows are in this instance probably the most benign attempt at
maintaining what Gramsci called ​“hegemony.” Education scholar
and organizer Eleni Schirmer explains his concept
[[link removed]]
like this: ​“the continuous arranging of the pieces of the
world — the ideas, images, language, culture, politics, music,
sexual norms, _everything_—in such a way that they affirm existing
power relations.” It is dating shows, but it is also the bans on
trans kids in sports
[[link removed]], the
attacks on trans healthcare
[[link removed]],
the panic over drag
[[link removed]].
It is the overturning of_ Roe v. Wade,_ the threat to overturn the
court decisions that uphold gay marriage
[[link removed]].
It is violence against trans people for simply existing. It is the
painting of everything outside of monogamous, married heterosexuality
as a threat, even if the thing that has undermined marriage the most
isn’t radical queers (unfortunately) but the crappy economy. 

The reality is that even if most working people wanted to live in the
kind of family that the right wing tells us is the correct one, we
can’t afford to. 

I hear you saying, ​“But Sarah, you promised us dating advice.
What does all this teach us about today’s relationships?” Aside
from the fact that the rise of work-from-home post-Covid has brought
with it the return of employers snooping in our homes
[[link removed]],
today we’re in a decidedly different point on the clock of
capitalism. We’re in a distinct interregnum, crawling out from
under the weight of compulsory heterosexuality and exploring all sorts
of different ways to live and love. And yet we’re still miserable
and lonely [[link removed]]
a lot of the time. 

We currently don’t have the same relations of economic inequality as
in Engels’ time (and in some ways it’s gotten worse). It has not
been an improvement to make women the breadwinners more often, to
destroy traditionally male forms of employment, to make formerly
secure forms of work more precarious while still keeping to a work
week designed for that Ford worker with a wife at home. But that
doesn’t mean we want to go backward, nor should it, tradwives
[[link removed]]
and incels
[[link removed]]
be damned. The fact that people have managed to salvage from the
collapse of the old regime new forms of joy and love and intimacy (and
always did experiment from within it, as Saidiya Hartman
[[link removed]] reminds us) is a miracle
considering all we’re contending with. 

Our struggles with love are profoundly political. If the old
industrial labor wanted monogamy, neoliberalism (even in its zombie
phase) wants us alone and constantly overwhelmed with choices. Housing
insecurity both compels people into cohabitation and encourages them
to stay
[[link removed]]
when things go to hell (and so does employer-based health insurance
[[link removed]]),
but stagnant wages and rising costs mean increased strain on those
same relationships. It’s not an accident that dating apps and
gig-work apps arose together and use similar interfaces and tools to
keep us swiping, always hoping there’ll be something better a tap
away. Dating apps are the gig work of romance, where we are both
worker and product. The skills and lifestyles of today’s networked,
job-hopping worker, in the low- or mid-wage economy, are colossally
unsuited to healthy relationships.

The old form is dying, but its death throes are lingering, and those
morbid symptoms are everywhere. Heterosexuality is broken, but just
opting out of it isn’t actually an option because the strains on
relationships are everywhere — they exist for queer couples and
throuples and casual flings too. Despite what the TERFs would have us
think, it’s just not all men’s fault — the violence of
a capitalist world takes many forms, and shifting power relations
mean that women have new opportunities, including new opportunities to
be brutal ourselves. Engels might be right, that the full freedom of
relationships based on ​“mutual fondness” will only be possible
after the abolition of capitalist property relations, but that’s not
terribly helpful for those of us who are lonely right now. 

Dating in the interregnum sucks, and neither I nor a couple of dead
communist thinkers can fix that for you, but a good starting place is
to recognize that things have not always been the way they are. They
can change if we organize to change them — to improve our
working conditions, but also to protect trans kids and drag story
hours and abortion access and everything that gives us a glimpse of
what freedom might look like. 

Who knows, you might meet someone(s) along the way. 

===

SARAH JAFFE [[link removed]] is a Type
Media Center Fellow, co-host (with Michelle Chen) of _Dissent_
magazine’s Belabored podcast, and a columnist at _The Progressive_.
She was formerly a staff writer at _In These Times _and the labor
editor at AlterNet. Her previous books are _Work Won’t Love You
Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone
_and _Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt_, which Robin D.G. Kelley
called ​“The most compelling social and political portrait of our
age.” You can follow her on Twitter @sarahljaffe
[[link removed]].

* Capitalism; The Family; Romantic Love; Valentine's Day;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]