The Revolutionary Power of Love

by Tina Trutanich · Published August 1, 2023 · Updated August 1, 2023

“Misunderstood, unproductive, roving, and promiscuous appetites tug at the matrix in which we desire.”[1]

Because desire is a social construct, love desired is a collective action toward our liberation. We desire life-giving and honest love. We desire liberation. Karl Marx once stated that our consciousness comes through our experience as social beings. Capitalism is not only a political and economic system, as most people understand it, but also permeates and colonizes our daily lives as a social structure. As such, we strive to build community, and mostly in the form of a “family”. As M.E. O’Brien states in Family Abolition Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, “oftentimes we feel as though we have found it.”[2] Under capitalism, though, we are prevented from constructing the communities and families we need.

If we all desire love and freedom, then we need other people to achieve those desires. Under a capitalist society, the “community” that is socially promoted by the state is the bourgeois, or nuclear, family. This model of family atomization is imposed to ensure we serve as individualized units of consumption and social reproduction. It is socially enforced by the most reactionary and oppressive political forces in society to uphold capitalist social relations. Nevertheless, we can also reimagine and recreate different forms of family and community that transcend the limitations of capitalism. Looking at community or building the commune is through a lifelong process of communist social reproduction requires a focus on queer liberation — specifically Trans Marxism and family abolition.[3]

Since social reproduction is gendered and racialized under the current system, femmes of color—primarily Black, Indigenous and Chicana women—do the labor. Communist social reproduction means sexism and racism, among other oppressions, face destruction in the fires of obliteration of capitalism through revolutionary struggle. What do we need to do to build the commune? Abolishing the “family” as we understand it under capitalism is an important task we must take up for our liberation.

Liberation through Family Abolition

What is family abolition? Some people may not have heard of the two words together. I know I hadn’t until my mid-twenties—when I came out as bisexual, pansexual, and queer. M.E. O’Brien reveals this important history of family abolition while articulating alternatives for the decolonial abolition communism we want and need. Decolonial abolition communism is the antidote to the diseases of colonialism, racism, and capitalism.

Under capitalism, the bourgeois-modelled family is the first social group, organization, and structure for many people. In this form, the family embodies pain, love, support, manipulation, coercion, and abuse. “In binding together both care and coercion, the family is necessarily conflicted, ambivalent, and always failing.”[4] For queer people like me, chosen family, community, and ‘homieship’ offer love and friendship necessary to combat the neglect, abuse, coercion, and disappointment experienced in the bourgeois family. O’Brien writes: “The nuclear family was developed by the new capitalist classes of Europe and circulated the world with colonialism.”[5] By the end of the 19th century, the white nuclear family was forced onto indigenous communities, as “the history of the family is also the history of white supremacy and genocide.”[6] Land dispossession, genocide, residential schools stripped indigenous people of life in order to force the white bourgeois family onto thriving indigenous community formations.

In the South, pre- and post- Reconstruction Black bonds and kinship were non-traditional and often queer. The concept of the single male breadwinner is and was a white colonial concept. By the 1970s clear messaging began to emerge calling for the abolition of this form of family, manifesting in movements and groups like Wages for Housework, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and among other writings, art, and struggles. Kay Lindsay’s “The Black Woman as Woman” conveys the white bourgeois family as a mechanism reinforcing oppression in Black life. Moving through time, the reader encounters the revolutionary feminists, sex workers, queers, and BIPOC committed to eradicating the white bourgeois family. Currently, this takes on new forms of kinship and care under the idea of communist social reproduction.

Communist social reproduction represents an alternative to the bourgeois family. For queer communists, the concept of care is a “material relationship, a set of forms of labor” that builds solidarity.[7] Mass movements build solidarity through care and inspire action. In the book, a healthy injection of inspiration is found in the delightful description of the romance and fury of sex workers rising up during the creation of the Paris Commune. For Karl Marx, the Paris Commune represented a brief moment (three months) where working-class proletarian life was realized, as workers took control of their workspaces, and a liberatory communism flourished. Sex worker Louise Michel shouting, “We are at least 25,000!” in the streets of Paris is a rallying call to all to think deeply and act boldly toward family abolition.[8] This call to abolish the family requires a “communist feminism” according to O’Brien. What does this communist feminism mean worldwide?

The rise of fascism in the US and elsewhere points to an urgency for family abolition, especially as a component of fascist organizing is the forceful reimposition of the patriarchal nuclear family alongside support for other types of coercion such as state repression. How do we connect the struggles to abolish police, prisons, and borders with family abolition? Family Abolition offers information on modern theoretical frameworks that center family abolition, queer liberation, and ultimately collective liberation and love.

The Importance of Transgender Marxism

What is Transgender Marxism? The heart of Marxism means that we as the working classes look to the writings and actions through a historical materialist lens and with the goal of seizing the means of production through a socialist revolution. Transgender Marxism centers the resistance and life of trans-ness. In the 1900s, queer theory looked at everything through gender, gender roles, and sexuality. Transgender Marxism further pushes the radical approach of many queer theorists and further incorporates the need for Marxist analysis, class struggle, and socialist revolution.

The book Transgender Marxism offers a collective of radical thoughts and ideas for transforming ourselves and building decolonial abolition communism. In one piece in the collection, Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology, the author writes: “People are made like life and language and planets, in the interactions and intimacies of difference and the creativity and desire that difference produces.”[9] The creativity and desire that difference produces means every person has their distinct role in the community. Thus, can look at building toward the Commune with a Marxist approach; meaning seizing the means of production in our communist social reproduction as they did in the Paris Commune of 1871. In other words, our liberation is bound up with the class struggle to overthrow capitalism.

The creativity and desire that difference produces means every person has their distinct role in the community.

In another brilliant piece in Transgender Marxism, ‘Why Are We Like This? The Primacy of Transsexuality”, Xandra Metcalfe argues post-capitalism comes after the obsession with the phallus is eradicated. The author writes: “Insofar as the phallus is a contingency, not a natural state, it too needs to reproduce itself generation-to-generation. Much like why capitalist countries must enact imperialism on socialist ones.”[10] The phallus represents the reproduction of dominance in patriarchal capitalism. The obsession as a cultural point of reference in addition to its representation in schools, work, public and private life underscores its binary mode of thinking that oppresses us. Hence, Metcalfe argues a gay communism (also a trans communism) will indeed liberate us.

Trans Marxism must be at the center of queer liberation. The attacks on us, the LGBTQIA + community—but most especially against trans people—are rooted in historic discrimination against queerness. Cultural repression as a form of anti-queerness, such as the banning of books and drag shows can be traced to, for instance, how the Nazis squashed the Institute for Sex Research in Berlin as a strategy in their rise to power. Today in the United States and elsewhere, bans on Black history and queer research represent a return to the tactics of fascists and proto-fascist forces who are hell-bent on erasing the crucial historic foundation of BIPOC uprisings and especially BIPOC queer uprisings.

In addition to resisting the attacks of fascists, reactionaries, TERFs (Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists) and others against the greater LGBTQIA+ community, we must continue to build and create our communal structures. Decolonial abolition communism requires fighting back and destroying the intergenerational cycles of white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism – and it also necessitates that creativity flourishes. There are Trans People Here by H. Melt is a beautiful collection of poems that illustrates this flourishing, focusing on trans joy, resistance, and love.

Building Commun(es)ity During Deep Multiplying Crises

Climate catastrophe, poverty, the rise of fascism and general decline in legitimacy of capitalist institutions represent deep and multiplying crises. Two concepts from Karl Marx and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offer foundations for building communist social reproduction. King’s concept of Beloved Community is one that I had learned about in my time in North Carolina. Black revolutionary comrades taught me King’s concept of beloved community in action “bound by a shared belief in the transformative power of love.”[11] In Killing Rage, Ending Racism bell hooks further explained this beloved community in action as collective action of communist love. “Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”[12] The Beloved Community offers an alternative to the nuclear family.

Similarly, Karl Marx uses the word gemeinwesen “community” interpreted also as “the communal being.”[13] This concept takes on several meanings under capitalism, but essentially one can define gemeinwesen as the collective form of community or the commune through mass collective action by the working class. This last part is important because it differs from the anarchist-primitivist view of the idyllic “back to nature” approach, and that of the pre-agricultural utopian commune. In short, we engage in collective action and a social revolution in order to promote individual human flourishing and love and liberation for all of us.

We engage in collective action and a social revolution in order to promote individual human flourishing and love and liberation for all of us.

How do we cultivate the commune from the foundations and findings of love and liberation? What are examples in our communities of love and liberation? Two recent movement examples are the Black Lives Matter Rebellion in the summer of 2020 and the proliferation of mutual aid groups during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Black Lives Matter protests drew millions of people and reinforced the revolutionary abolitionist politics of most involved. Unfortunately, this led to the funnel of resources to the non-profit industrial complex, NGOs, and the Democratic Party. The demand to abolish the police was not only ignored by Democratic Party operatives and establishment politicians, but funding for policing increased even though countless studies including this recent one by Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California show that police neither solve nor prevent crime. They function as our oppressors and enforcers of capitalist social relations. Now, communities across the US are rising up against the construction of Cop City in Atlanta. People are forming community watches and building organizations independent from the two capitalist parties and their corporate, imperialist, pro-police system. Hence, liberation is envisioned through revolutionary abolition of the police, imprisonment, and surveillance.

The inhumane US government response to the COVID-19 pandemic forced working class people and communities to create and solidify mutual aid groups. Because “care is deeply political”, the importance of building the commune(s) and care took on new formations and a deeper meaning. I am part of the Greater Long Beach Mutual Aid Network where we work against capitalism through food justice and building community through love and liberation. No doubt there is hope in queer community organizing and revolutionary abolitionism so that we can continue to keep each other safe and build decolonial abolition communism.

NOTES

[1] J.N. Hood, “Encounters in Lancaster.” Transgender Marxism. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke, Eds. (London: Pluto Press, 2021), p. 176.

[2] M.E. O’Brien. Family Abolition Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. (London: Pluto Press, 2023), p. 176.

[3] Ibid., p.195.

[4] Ibid., p. 73.

[5] Ibid., p. 90.

[6] Ibid., p. 91.

[7] Ibid., p. 219

[8] Ibid., p. 96

[9] Nathanial Dickson, “Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology.” Transgender Marxism, Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke, Eds. (London: Pluto Press, 2021), p. 215.

[10] Xandra Metcalfe, “‘Why Are We Like This?:’ The Primacy of Transsexuality.” Transgender Marxism, Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke, Eds. (London: Pluto Press, 2021), p. 224.

[11] M.E. O’Brien, p. 240.

[12] bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism. (New York: Owl Books,1995), p. 265.

[13] M.E. O'Brien, p. 243.

Tina Trutanich is a queer communist worker and poet from Spain and California. They write about food, nature, revolution, love, and liberation.