“Love Is Freeing”

(A #FuckFascismLoveYourFriends offering from my book “Try Anarchism for Life: The Beauty of Our Circle” published by @tangled_wilderness)

Anarchists are especially enamored with four-letter words. Take ACAB or fuck the police and endless variations on that theme, such as fuck patriarchy. So enraptured are anarchists with such four-letter terms of acrimony that these words are recognizable around the globe, whether spray painted on walls or put into abolitionist practice. Indeed, ACAB has put Esperanto and its aspirations to shame in becoming a universal language within and well beyond anarchism.

Yet one four-letter word has taken longer to fully enter the anarchist vocabulary: love.

Sure, this term was coupled well over a century ago with another four-letter word, and one that has always been near and dear to anarchists, free, making for the union of free love. But free love in theory and especially practice became narrowed down to a three-letter word, sex. As pleasurable and consensual as sex can or ought to be, one can have lots of it without any love. And when sex isn’t pleasurable and/or consensual, it can have diminishing returns on love or be downright unloving, as many an anarcha/x-feminist knows all too well.

One can have an orgasmic plenitude of love, however, if expressions of love wrap their arms around so much more than just sex.

As such, slowly over the decades anarchism began to see the potential of encircling itself with love. It’s commonplace to now see this four-letter word bandied about in everything from “love and rage” to “hate fascism, love soccer” to “fall in love, not in line.” Still, such proclamations frequently remain just that, and it’s only been because of the exhausting rage and exhaustive efforts of feminist, queer, and/or trans anarchists that anarchism, in praxis, has fallen deeply in love with love.

Of course, the relationship of anarchism to love is a work in progress, as it always will and probably should be. Love takes labor. Indeed, one of its best attributes is that it points beyond capitalism. It demands of us that we’re at once antiwork—since work under capital is always an abusive relationship, devoid of love, no matter how much we delude ourselves
otherwise—and ardent proponents of the labors of love—the passion-filled ways we produce and reproduce what we need and desire, materially and immaterially.

Love also is one of the few, if only, “things” that capitalism can’t completely commodify. Sure, this society of the spectacle can hawk the notion that “chocolate and roses” is the battle cry of love. The elusive quality of love, though—still indescribable, despite countless poems and songs singing its praises; still unable to be bottled, despite countless potions—has made it impervious to the arrows of capitalism. What we feel when we love and are loved is at heart anungovernable emotion that allows us to embrace what it just might feel like to be free.

Then too, it allows us to enter into postscarcity anarchism in a way nothing else can. For love, when expanded to circle all of our relations with humans and the nonhuman world, has the capacity for endless abundance. Love only grows when we share it. The more we open ourselves to love, the more we circulate our love as a verb, the more there is for everyone, and the more there will be enough to make us feel wholly loved when our hearts are broken.

Such a wealth of love points beyond property relations, toward commons; beyond stinginess, toward gifting; beyond going “hungry,” toward nourishment; beyond competition, toward cooperation; beyond binaries, toward boundless possibilities—beyond all the ways we’re compelled to beg for crumbs when in fact there’s deliciousness aplenty for us all.

Love, in short, isn’t free; far better, love is freeing. Love is the key to freedom.

(photos of street art seen in Exarchia recently: etching of a heart in black with red flame coming out of it; “antifa” tag in black on pavement with a heart next to it)