“What is love, baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.”
To love in this world is to be heartbroken. How can we not be after witnessing more than a year of the brutal machineries of death employed by the zionists in Palestine? Amid this heartbreak it can be easy to retreat into ourselves, to resent the world, and care for the self above all else. It is at times like this when it can be useful to ritualise our commitment to the world. This text is a part of that personal ritual against disaffection from the world, and a manifesto on a commitment to love. There are several quotations in this text that have become something akin to dhikr, remembrances that love is the animating force of resistance. The first of these is from Ghassan Kanafani: “Everything in this world can be robbed or stolen, except one thing; this one thing is the love that emanates from a human being towards a solid commitment to a conviction or cause.”
Aviv Kochavi, chief of staff of the IOF, has likened military leadership to the work of an artist or intellectual; critical and reflective of shifting circumstances and creative in setting and execution of objectives. “Military leaders,” Kochavi writes, “are first and foremost required to lead themselves and their subordinates in the process of knowledge development.” This framing of the military as an instrument of knowledge creation realized only through the execution of violence reiterates the construction of the Palestinian captive population as experimental subjects in the production of an artisanal military precision for which zionist military tactics and technologies have long been valued. For Abdeljawad Omar, the more recent reliance on algorithmic doctrines of mass destruction marks a departure from this military aesthetic, exposing to the world how Israel has been experienced by Palestinians: “as a regime of pure terror.” Nevertheless, what we have been witnessing remains nothing short of a curated execution of military force, a new aesthetic regime constructed from the disposability of life itself, inviting the world to “catch up with its stark monstrosity, and cement its collusion in all the horrors that ‘total victory’ might require.”
While the imperial Western regimes have accepted this invitation enthusiastically, the stark apathy with which this violence has been received reveals the effectiveness of racial capitalist systems of alienation and disaffection. Those of us who have been wading through dense combinations of rage, grief, shock, and exhaustion have surely been re/acting with love, a relationality that defies the layers of abstraction through which we have witnessed the violence. But what type of love is it? Richard Gilman-Opalsky writes in The Communism of Love that “capital only succeeds in commodifying love by destroying it, by converting it into an impoverished ‘false form’ (that is, a spectacle) of itself.”[i] Would there be an empathy for Palestine without its spectacle? There is much to be said on the scarcity of solidarity with other causes, the violence against which is no less visceral. There is certainly much to say about the racialized dispensation of empathy. But I will ask only this. Is there a gaze that observes but does not empower? Is there a way of seeing which does not objectify?
Abdias Nascimento has written my favorite quote on love: “Love is more than just empathy, a consequence of subjectivity; it is solidarity in active commitment.”[ii] Nascimento was writing against the poverty of artistic abstraction, which “reduces itself to nothing, to the artifice of ‘art for art’s sake,’” alienating the artist from their ethical responsibilities to the world. For Nascimento, art is “an event of love,” a dynamic relational value aimed at the affirmation of life. Art must draw you out of yourself, urge you to feel, and structure your desire to perceive yourself in the object of your labour or your gaze. If this is the case, what are the consequences of enclosing representational forces through regimes of value, valorisation, and typology? For war photography, Sheung Yiu and Zoe Samudzi suggest that the composition of images under Western regimes of aestheticization centralizes the work of the photographer at the expense of the visceral experience of violence, constituting a parasitic relationship that transforms the ugliness of violence into something palatable, and thus consumable.
Aestheticization therefore functions to objectify life experiences, evident most explicitly in war photography, but present no less in the regimes of value that structure representation and consumption under racial capitalism, manufacturing a scarcity of relation to which aesthetic provides its catharsis. Image, sound, object, scent, and taste all become their own affective cathartic industry- itself for itself. So, if capital has indeed molded relation into an insatiable beast of desire, then to what extent has the commodity form infiltrated our ways of relating? Representation, care, intimacy, food, sex, and solidarity have been transformed into consumer relations. Does the horizon of capitalist solidarity end at the supermarket aisle?
The Sacred Souls: Easier Said Than Done
“true love, it ain’t easy… easier said than done.”
There are reasons to be skeptical about the power of love. Natasha Lennard writes in Policing Desire that “by treating sex as a political project of rupturing preconditioned desires, might we end up reducing each other to experimental objects for our self-development?”[iii] Part of what is confronting about Lennard’s question is the conflation of love with romance and sex. As Indigenous scholars* have noted, the constitution of capitalism involved the rupture of Indigenous relationalities, not only through enforced heteronormativity but also the severing of relations with the community and the land. This enclosure of love is essential for situating capital in the world, necessitating the transformation of relations of love, reciprocity, and care to those of objectification, commodification, and consumption. As Ed McGowan writes, “Though love isn’t a capitalist plot, romance is.”*
This tension between love and romance is in many ways synonymous with the personal and political as partly constitutive of the segregation of the spaces in which real politics (and real love) happens and those in which they do not. This is, of course, to speak of the home, which remains the deadliest space for women. It is also to speak of the street, the function, the party, and all those spaces where we labor for replenishment. All deadly. Much work has been done on queering reproductive relations, disrupting and offering alternatives to the patriarchal and gendered configurations of the household, sex, intimacy, and kinship. Sophie K Rosa, however, cautions that we should not be overly optimistic about the potentials of ‘non-normative relationships and sex’ to ultimately disrupt capital’s hold on desire since these “supposedly ‘radical’ ways of relating can well be subsumed by capital.” Citing Lennard, she suggests that while dismissing queerness as praxis would constitute a patriarchal dismissal of intimacy, the techno-capitalist platformisation of sexuality and intimacy, queer and otherwise, “soothes the status quo.” That being the marketisation of our means of relational subsistence.
Black Radical Feminists have long held that colonial kinship, the model of the household, has been sustained not only through gender but also racialized sexual and domestic labour. Saidiya Haartman says that ‘slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship.’[iv] Queering intimate and kinship relations without a deep attentiveness to the relations and structures of race and class will consequently always fall short of meaningfully disrupting the functions of racial capitalism. This is to say that while our relations may be non-binary, polyamorist, anarchic, or sex kinky, its praxis is only enabled by global commodity markets sustained by the disavowal of racialized life and labour. The exploitative labour and land tenure practices involved in the production of rubber, the stitching of lingerie, and the assembly of vibrators are all deeply relevant to discussions on sexual violence. Dare we even say our sex is consensual?
Fuck society, Ase
Fuck you wannabеs, Ase
Fuck your hypocrisy, Ase
Don’t want any part of it, Ase
In order to divorce racial, gender, and queer politics from projects of self-actualization as a function of capitalist extraction and build politics that delivers a collective fuck you to the capitalist classes, there needs to be serious discussion on how identarian politics at the level of catharsis have served to pacify and distract radical movement. But, if you will, I would like to flip this argument on its head (being upside down can be fun). The majority of us organizing and doing solidarity work are not insinuating ourselves into movements to diffuse targeted action. We are there simply to do the work to liberate our own lives and the lives of our kin from their implications within racial capital. The focus of our politics is not spectacle but praxis, the recognition that capital functions are both racial and patriarchal. Models of capitalism, commonly espoused in leftist movements, are often oversimplified and highly convenient, relying on biblical readings of century-old texts as if no one with a vagina and a bit of melanin ever dared resist their oppression, let alone write about it.
The most frequent mobilisers of identarian politics I’ve come across have been brosialists and manarchists who mobilize class to preemptively identify themselves within the oppressed classes by obscuring the ways vulnerability under racial capitalism is ascribed through race and gender. This is, in part, a cathartic reaction that spares people from the painful acknowledgment that they, too, are implicated in power. But by doing so, the destructive relations to capital experienced by the global majority are cast as secondary to particularized exploitative relations between workers and capitalists to foreground straight white men as the ideal revolutionary subject. This analysis is intellectually lazy and weakens movements by placing additional pressure on those who often contribute the most labour and are most invested in changing the world to validate their revolutionary credentials.
The issue is not of conflicting interests but instead of identifying the systemic totality[v] of racial capital. Since the middle of the 20th century, anticolonial writers and initiators of Black Radical Traditions have problematized the centrality of the worker in revolutionary theorizing. These writers, from the Francophone Caribbean to the Black Panther Party in the USA and affiliates of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa[vi] have stressed that capitalism operates conterminously through logics of both exploitation, disposability, and elimination, signified through (globalized) processes of lumpenization[vii], apartheid, and genocide. This means that racial capitalist structures are built through contradictory and parasitic relationships, encapsulated by that relation between the war photographer and those experiencing violence. I sit with this understanding when I claim that the working class, sustained in part by the crushed bones and spilled blood of the earth’s wretched, is the mediating force between revolution and racial capital. Or, in the words of Eldrige Cleaver, “the Right Wing of the Proletariat.” This is not meant to dismiss the revolutionary potential of an organized working class but rather a call to think seriously about what is required to build a collective consciousness capable of confronting racial capital. Decolonial and Indigenous scholars have long stressed that alignments of power are often layered and contradictory, with ignorance of these contradictions resulting in the mediation of consciousness towards normative conditions set by those in or in proximity to power. The excavation of these contradictions then, through popular education and deep reflection, offers possibilities for critical analysis and a tangible route towards a revolutionary consciousness that crosses the contradicting divisions of racial capitalism.
Ada Limón: Calling Things What They Are
“I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”
To take seriously the necessity of building class consciousness, we must contend with how racial capitalism functions through separation and enclosure to parasitize itself on relation and build contradictory relations of disposability, production, extraction, and consumption. For Gargi Bhattacharya, it is the heartbreak of this separation that is the class consciousness of racial capitalism. I concur but refract toward the pain. The pain of guilt, grief, exhaustion, and violence. The hurt that no catharsis can heal. Solidarity hurts, and there is something masochistic about loving in this world.
[i] Gilman-Opalsky, Richard. 2020. The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value. AK Press.
[ii] Originally published in Abdias Nascimento. 1976. Afro-Brazilian Art, A Liberating Spirit. Black Art: An International Quarterly. 1.1.
[iii] Lennard, Natasha. 2019. Being Numerous: Essays on a Non-Fascist Life. Verso Press.
[iv] In conversation with Judith Butler. Mentioned in Butler, Judith. 2002. Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual? Differences: A journal of feminist cultural studies. 13.1, 14-44.
[v] A term most used in Social Reproduction Theory. See, for instance, Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2018. Mapping Social Reproduction Theory. Verso Books Blog.
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3555-mapping-social-reproduction-theory?srsltid=AfmBOoqVN0yxiMQjEGbWIa4NlcHLtPirtVc1n8Ljn6FDMkm1aDpgkt56. Accessed: 01-02-2025.
[vi] Referring to Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon from Martinique, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver and others of the Black Panther Party, Steve Biko, Martin Legassik, David Hemson, Bernard Magubane and others associated with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
[vii] The processes of dispossession and abandonment of populations under racial capitalism.
* For instance; Tallbear, Kim. 2018. Making love and relations beyond settler sex and family. In: Clarke, Adele and Harraway, Donna (eds). Making Kin Not Population. Prickly Paradigm Press., Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2016. As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
* McGowan, Todd. 2016. Capitalism and Desire: The psychic cost of free markets. Columbia University Press.
