Itzel, This is the article I was talking about-- Who Will Claim the Power of Love? by Brooke Heagerty Some say there is more to life than love, but I don’t know what that could be. Love is no small thing. It encompasses everything we do. It has given voice to the deepest of human hearts. It has fueled the sacrifices of martyrdom, transformed the meek, invested the frail with the strength of giants. For us, the only question can be: Who will lay claim to its power? Those who have thrown the world into poverty and despair, or our class, the millions who are struggling for a world where love is finally and truly possible. Love is part of life Human beings are social creatures. We can live only in relationship to others. We make the wherewithal for our existence together. We reproduce ourselves by making children together. We construct societies for these basic elements of life to be organized and guaranteed. Along the threadbare sinews of these circuits of existence we craft, layer by layer, the ideas which define our sense of ourselves, our relations to others, our aspirations, joys, and desires. The affection between friends, a word whispered in a lover’s ear, the tenderness that wells inside as parents gaze at their sleeping child: all these expressions of what we know as love are infused with a meaning that reflects not only the connection between individuals but the connection of individuals to the wider society. The need for love is not silly or trivial, it as much a part of us as the beating of our hearts, essential to our survival. Who defines love? Yet this dense network of relationships is not and never has been entirely of our own making. The ruling class of every era has struggled to shape and dictate the relationships between and among people, whether this be the relationship between the serf and the lord or the worker and the capitalist, or between men and women, children and parent, or among the peoples of the world. The ruling classes throughout the ages have sought to make love serve their interests. Writers, theoreticians, and theologians have all been brought into service to articulate and expound upon love—who should define it, what it should be, and ultimately who should love who. Under capitalism, every aspect of our lives, even love, turns on how we will survive in a world where everything is reduced to the money relation. The bonds of family were reduced to a unit of economics, love between men and women simply a means to hold that unit together, children simply a means of providing future workers. As long as capitalism provided the wherewithal for us to pay for our existence, we were able to live with the limitations the system had set for us. Love, of course, could never be entirely controlled. As all people have done throughout the ages, we loved in our own ways, often against insurmountable odds. We forged our bonds, formed our families, raised our children, grew old and were remembered when we passed. At times of great change we broke love out beyond narrow limitations, drawing upon its great power to stand against injustice. Yet as long as our relationships were determined by the dog-eat-dog world of the capitalist economic system, love could never be anything more than a shadow of its true self. Love belongs to us Capitalism teaches us to love and care for only those who are close to us, that we can solve everything by “taking care of our own.” When inevitably love is not enough to solve the problems of a disintegrating world, they tell us to cut our losses. Save ourselves. This lesson is not only out of step with morality, but with the essence of what it means to be human. We are social creatures. As individuals we live in relation to those we personally know or love, but as humans our well-being is directly linked to the well-being of all humanity. Expanding our notion of love beyond the horizons of our individual relations to encompass a love for all humanity does not reduce the importance of our loved ones in our lives or denigrate the love we give today. It infuses us with the moral force necessary to reconstruct the world in the interests of our class—a world where no child goes without, every family is healthy and happy, every heart fulfilled. We stand at the crossroads of profound choices. The world is being torn apart—who will remake it? The ruling class to whom every human relation must be reduced to the bottom line, for whom every human impulse must be stamped out? Or us, those who struggle under the yoke of inhumanity that capitalism has placed on our necks, who have found and given love when everything seemed dead around us, who have carried a vision of a world free from want and fear down through the ages? This world is now possible but we must fight to win it. Love lies there, we have only to reach out and grasp its waiting hand. from the People’s Tribune
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 16:28:50 +0000