After reading both the Jacobin magazine interview with Meagen Day and Evelina Johansson Wilén on the topic of romantic love, capitalism and the family, as well as the response in the Cosmonaut letters section by Mila Volkova, I wanted to contribute a few remarks on the topic as I felt the most important takeaway for socialists was being lost. Both sides make some good points, in my opinion, Wilén and Day in their critique of contemporary heteropessimism and Volkova in bringing up the long history of Marxist critique of the family rather than limiting the discussion to recent academic entries. The problem, however, is that all three make a key error in understanding the relation of love to the reproduction of capitalism.

Wilén and Day spoke of love as a purely subjective phenomenon separate from the unremunerated social reproductive labor which actually reproduces capitalism, and Volkova on the other hand suggests that romantic love truly is internal to capitalism and that it is necessary to propose an alternative of “comradely love” which unlike bourgeois romantic love that restrictively believes in the completion of the individual through finding the one, would be truly open and free and also in harmony with the broader community. First, let us deal with Wilén and Day's discourse. Love cannot be considered a subjective thing if we are to take a materialist ontology seriously, no matter what level of abstraction we're working on. I do not mean this to make a glib point about chemicals and neurons, but rather to say that affection between two individuals is an objective phenomenon, and one which is a necessary component to free association of any sort. We can even quantify this attraction via a sociometric diagram which measures how long people speak or take actions towards one another, and whether the sentiment of such actions are positive or negative. And indeed, it is specifically this affection which capitalism is parasitic on, as without this affection there would be no coordinated, non-remunerated division of labor. One could perhaps object that such coordination doesn't necessarily require positive sentiment between the participants, and this is true, but absent top-down regulation of individual actions, that is, in a situation of authentic freedom, such affection and desire is necessary for individuals to collide and join together. Hence, we must insist that love is both an objective phenomenon and one which is internal to the reproduction of capitalism, purely subjective love, love which is concealed to everyone but the one doing the desiring, cannot be used as a basis for such coordination nor a relationship.

However, if we come to Volkova's insistence on the centrality of specifically romantic love to capitalism, there is a different problem. If you were to confront a liberal with this sort of critique, their default response would be that liberal capitalist societies make possible any form of connection people desire, particularly now that gay marriage has been legalized in many Western countries, not just an idealized “romantic” connection, but whatever connection, whether platonic, perverse, or “comradely”. And there is a lot of truth to this! There is no formal legal prohibition on non-romantic love. Some feminist thinkers in a structuralist of post-structuralist tradition may insist upon the use of ideological apparatuses and culture interpellating individuals to maintain certain ideological notions of love, but let us not forget the basic Althusserian caveat, which was delivered hand-in-hand with this notion of interpellation, that there is no outside to ideology, that ideology is not a “cop” inside our heads, and therefore we can not consider the existence or lack of ideological interpellation as a condition for freedom or unfreedom. The more basic insight of the unfreedom of women in the family, which has consistently been identified by feminists, is that of dependency, where, just as the working class as a whole cannot live without the wage, women in the family could not live without the wage earner. While it's true that gender pay gaps persist, it's also true that women's income distribution has much more closely come to resemble men's in the past 50 years of capitalist development, when many prohibitions on women's access to labor markets were lifted. Contrary to the wishes of the Marxist Feminists who proposed wages for housework, capitalism's response to the feminist critique of this dependency was to include women in traditional wage labor. The Marxist Feminists who asserted that unremunerated labor was necessary for the extended reproduction of capitalism were not wrong; however, it's simply been the case that capitalism has been unable to solve these problems for its extended social reproduction and has relied on exporting social reproduction costs to the developing world and privatizing them onto a handful of individuals, mostly women. In short, nothing that capitalism has done has actually dealt with the issue of dependency of unremunerated labor; rather, it has swept it under the rug, leading to less such labor existing overall outside of commodity relations, as well as liberals dismissing the notion that such dependency matters at all now that everyone has, in principle, access to the labor market.

Therefore, we cannot speak of romantic love as being the love which capitalism depends on or enforces through repression; what capitalism is parasitic upon is affection of any type, which attempts to contain the centrifugal forces of commercial society, and which necessarily fails at this containment over time. Nor do I believe it is right to say the future sorts of love of a socialist society must be of an especially comradely sort, which is to say, a love which is in harmony with a revolutionary society and “responsible” to the community. We must speak of the possibility of romantic love, which is to say, the freedom of a particular perversion of irresponsible all-encompassing desire, as necessarily included within the freedom we propose when we speak of the emancipation of love from economic considerations.

I do not believe abolition of the family is particularly effective as a slogan; however, what is essential is the creation of a new corporate form which makes possible both arbitrary free associations of people as well as the coordination of non-remunerated labor without dependency, a form which the current family form would only become a subset of. Also not often discussed is the necessary reform of eliminating barter taxes on individuals to make such a form possible as an immediate goal, as barter taxes prevent the formalization of the unremunerated labor section of the economy, and therefore prevent individuals from freely moving from one unremunerated position to another through the recognition of their skills and abilities. Only when an individual can freely leave a position of unremunerated labor and find a position elsewhere can they be free from dependency in the same way that they are free from dependency on a particular employer via the labor market. To be sure, this does not solve the larger problem of ensuring a basic level of subsistence for everyone, which socialism would, but if the reforms of the past century were worth doing to reduce the gendered dependency of women in the family, so would these such reforms.

Nicolas Villarreal