Can one really talk about love within a capitalist society?
Everyone talks about love and no one really talks about it as if it were a serious topic of utmost importance. Love within capitalism is nothing more than a consumer product on par with any other commodity, a frivolous subject that crams any kind of pop fiction, from songs to romantic movies, a gimmick to sell other products. In Italy, for example, the cliché of the family in love is used as the backbone of a famous marketing campaign for the sole purpose of selling cookies.
But unfortunately, the facts show quite a different reality from the glossy one shown in the media. Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his essay “The Agony of Eros” describes a world in which love is on the verge of extinction, threatened by the most unbridled individualism, the fruit of globalized capitalism. Neoliberalism is killing Eros, subjugating it to the laws of productivity, perfomativity, and accounting for everything. It’s trying to cut the claws off love, to tame a beast that, by nature, is rebellious, untamable, and escapes any chain. And unfortunately, it’s also succeeding well.
Never before have we had so much availability, thanks to apps like Tinder and Bumble, which, while they make it easier to meet people, also put us in front of the illusion of endless possibilities in what I call “the Netflix paradox”: if we previously had only a handful of channels with a few movies and no choice, now we can choose at any time from thousands of titles from every era and genre. But most of the time we are paralyzed by the choice and go to bed without watching anything. Before, we would end up watching a bad or a previously seen movie, but at least we would watch a movie until the end, which always left us with something. Now it’s the same in relationships, in front of so many possibilities, in the end, most of the time we don’t choose anything, thinking that the next date will be better, that the next person will be more compatible, we run away terrified at the first difficulty, often without even bothering to communicate with the other person (the famous ghosting), as if they never existed.
We are suffocated by an excess of external stimuli, victims of the so-called FOMO, or the constant fear of missing out on something better somewhere else. In doing so, we eventually fall victim to the illusion that we can choose and always improve our options, but the only result is that we sink into ourselves and our individualism, stressed by the excess of opportunities and unable to jump in bravely.
Again according to Byung-Chul Han, love is the dialectical encounter with the Other, with what is different from us; it is a loss of self in the other only to return transformed, grown up. Capitalist society, on the other hand, discourages this kind of encounter with the Other and pushes exclusively for the search for what we already know, that is ourselves; love is transformed into a narcissistic ritual of the individual seeking themselves in a mirror and shunning any kind of conflict and diversity. The result is a fragmented society of lonely and selfish individuals folded in on themselves, under the illusion of freedom and independence, but in reality, victims of depression, which is by definition the inability to live.
The only real cure for depression is precisely the ability to love, to give, and to care (for others and ourselves). Indeed, as Thomas Mann puts it:
“Happiness isn’t being loved; that was just a slightly nauseous satisfaction of vanity. Happiness is loving and perhaps seizing a few short illusory moments of intimacy with the object of one’s love.”
Even though statistics say we are having less and less sex (although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the number of times one has sex doesn’t really say anything about the quality), in neoliberal society we are under the illusion that we are living in the days of sexual liberation, and instead, true sexuality, the explosive, revolutionary sexuality capable of transcending the individual and bringing them into connection with each other and the world is repressed in favor of a merely performative, accounted-for sexuality, reduced to genitality, to the description of practices and experiences made as if it were a sticker album. Yet, not enough space is ever given to the substance of sex, its intensity, and its cognitive and generative power. We simply list the number of partners we have, how many different nationalities they are, the number of practices we have tried, and how many sex toys we own and completely forget to remember how many times we have felt truly naked and vulnerable before the eyes of another.
Capitalism has enslaved us so much that it’s also succeeding in destroying the last bastion of freedom, which is to love, because, as Jennifer Guerra says
“Love is useless and that’s why it’s revolutionary.”
It’s revolutionary, so it’s frightening, even terrifying, threatening to subvert and screw up a world that wants us to be lonely, depressed, slaves to ourselves, consumers, and producers.
Bell Hooks, in “All About Love”, argues that a major obstacle to creating a society capable of love is the primacy of the monogamous nuclear family instead of the community. In recent years, there has been a debate about the different possible types of relationships: there isn’t only monogamy, but there are multiple ways of being in relationships, and these go under the umbrella term “non-monogamies,” some examples of which may be polyamory, open couples or relational anarchy. Many people who adopt these types of relationships claim that, among other things, it’s a form of dissidence against the capitalist patriarchal system. But is this the case? I think it is crucial to open the world to a multiplicity of relationship forms, but I don’t think that the sheer number of emotional bonds one decides to have is in itself anti-capitalist and necessarily more ethical than monogamy.
It all depends not so much on how many people you love, but how you love them. If deciding to emotionally bind oneself to a single person is difficult, exhausting, sometimes even painful, and, above all, requires a great deal of time, deciding to relate to multiple people multiplies the degree of difficulty and commitment by the number of people I decide to love. How, then, do we ethically love multiple people within a capitalist society when there is less and less time, in general, to devote to love, compressed between ever-increasing work and the myriad commitments to which we dedicate ourselves? How much is the willingness to live a non-monogamy immune from the virus of FOMO and boredom? These remarks of mine are in no way meant to deny the validity of non-monogamies, but simply to give them complexity and view them critically. While it’s true that in nature we are not born monogamous, it is also true that “in nature” we do not belong to cities of millions that move all the time, but our ancestors were part of small groups that lived together for most of their lives. Human beings by nature need novelty and stability, security and adventure in equal measure, but now I have the impression that we give too much importance to perpetual novelty, the motto of our century is “break your comfort zone,” without remembering that finding a comfort zone in life is difficult and comfort should be protected, not avoided as if it were the plague.
To come back to the debate between monogamy and non-monogamy I believe that both can be victims of capitalism and both can be ethical and dissident, it all depends on the amount of commitment, care, and willingness to suffer that I decide to put into my relationships and also on the quality of emotional education that I have received, otherwise, it would be a bit like expecting to ice skate when you can’t even walk. When I talk about openness to suffering, I don’t think that we have to be in a relationship with people who are going to hurt us, but the pain is inherent in every process of growth and change, and you can’t love without being open to the possibility of experiencing pain (very trivially because the other person might die or leave us), as Bell Hooks also argues, in “All about love”.
Love in its fullest form includes not only sexual-affectionate relationships, but also family, community, and, above all, friendship. Capitalism places the latter in a totally subordinate position, giving it a real role only during childhood and teen years, as if it were a preparatory phase for the couple’s relationship, and instead, it’s one of the most important forms of loving in life, probably also one of the most enduring, because it’s not loaded with all the expectations with which sexual-affective relationships are invested and therefore it’s freer to express itself and evolve spontaneously.
I believe that a society that decides to love, rather than increasing the number of sexual partners (which, by all means, is perfectly fine) should give friendship back the space it deserves, and with friendship, all community relationships, such as those with neighbors, co-workers or trivially with the baker, should be re-evaluated; and, to have their own importance these relationships should not necessarily become sexual, but simply express compassion, closeness, give us that feeling of belonging to humankind, that awareness that we are all in the same boat, that we are not alone, which unfortunately we are forgetting.
Jennifer Guerra in her book “Il capitale amoroso” (Italian for “Love Capital”) says that love is not just a private affair, but is a definite political choice. And it should be approached as such. The way I love reflects the society in which I live, and only by revolutionizing the way we experience affection can we hope to regenerate society. As mentioned earlier, love is the dialectical encounter with the other, and therefore it’s a force that allows us to continually question ourselves, revise our position, and integrate it with that of the rest of the world, otherwise what we get is only a collapse of the individual into their narcissism. Jennifer Guerra talks about six different types of love, borrowed from the Greek tradition: eros, ludos, storge, mania, pragma and agape. Pragma is the prevailing ideology in our society, it’s the utilitarian love, the one that tells us to love when it suits us to do so, that pushes us to stay with those we don’t love for fear of being alone or to reject those we love for fear of losing ourselves, of setting aside our ego for a moment. Or again it is love that drives us to choose as a partner that person who has all the normative characteristics accepted by society to increase our value in the eyes of others. Or the Instagram post that tells us “if it’s difficult (i.e. when the slightest difficulty arises) then it’s not true love,” but in this life, there is nothing easy and if we are not willing to make any kind of effort we will never get anywhere. By this I do not mean that love has to be an obstacle course loaded only with suffering, frustration, and problems, but it is also not an easy and immediate thing as the narrative of the other half of the apple wants us to believe, according to which we will meet a person who’s simply perfect for us and with whom we will fit in perfectly and live happily ever after.
The absolute most revolutionary form of love, on the other hand, is Agape, unconditional love as altruism, compassion, and self-sacrifice. As Bell Hooks and Jennifer Guerra argue, it is about stopping seeing love as simply an irrational accident of fate that catches us unwittingly making us blind, but seeing it as a dissident choice to be made every day against a society that despises vulnerability and caring. Because in reality, we are not blind when we are in love, we are blind when we stop loving and become cynical and disillusioned.
So is there really a way to resist the destruction of love (and with it life itself) and capitalist patriarchal society? The answer is yes, as simple as it is revolutionary. The answer is in deciding to love anyway, even if it’s useless, if it’s not productive, if it’s exhausting, and in all likelihood will also make us suffer and wonder why we are doing it. But without love there is no life, and if we want to live we have no choice but to love.
Bibliography (a little bit messy, but whatever)
- Jennifer Guerra, Il capitale amoroso. Manifesto per un eros politico e rivoluzionario, Bompiani, 2021
- Bell Hooks, All about love: new visions, William Morrow & Co, 1999
- Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros, The MIT Press, 2017
- Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger, 1903
