💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › crimethinc-say-it-with-barricades.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 23:30:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Say It with Barricades
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: February 14, 2017
Language: en
Topics: peace, love
Source: Retrieved on 22nd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/02/14/say-it-with-barricades-the-difference-between-peace-and-love

CrimethInc.

Say It with Barricades

What do anarchists mean when we talk about love? For some the word is

inextricably associated with pacifism. Spiritual leaders like Martin

Luther King, Jr. preached love and non-violence as one and the same.

“Peace and love”—together, these words have become a mantra invoked to

impose passivity on those who would stand up for themselves. But does

love always mean peace? Do we need to throw out the one if we disagree

tactically with the other? What does it mean for us to extol love in

such a violent time, when more and more people are losing faith in

nonviolence? What is actually at stake in embracing or rejecting the

rhetoric of love?

This word, love, has been stretched so thin as to be almost transparent,

defined so variously as to be almost meaningless, distorted by abusers

and advertisers alike. In the 16^(th) century, attacking Wyncote’s

translation of the Bible, Thomas More excoriated his rival for using

this cheap and common word. For More, exalted religious concepts could

not be properly expressed by this earthy Anglo-Saxon term. Centuries

later, thousands of pop songs and billboards have further muddied the

field. As a cliché and generalization, “love” feels as sticky and hollow

as a punctured Valentine’s chocolate. Like this commercialized holiday,

rallying under the banner of love can feel dated and suspect.

In a world of fragmented and monetized care, it can be hard to recognize

what makes love a powerful force for mutual freedom. We grow up in a

culture of scarcity, longing for love but pretending we don’t need it.

The commodification of care into discrete roles, as parents pay others

to care for their children and executives pay secretaries and sex

workers for different forms of attention, causes us to think of love in

transactional terms. The media reinforces this by feeding us stories

that cast romantic love as the one thing that can save us; pop songs and

movies justify any kind of bad behavior in pursuit of love, and we hear

that love is something we need to earn and keep, like money. If we do,

everything will blossom in and around us—we will have escaped the

austerity that crushes all the unloved into early graves. Every romantic

comedy hides the specter of our fragmented and exploitative social

relations. Every misogynist assaulter, flush with entitlement, can claim

love as an excuse—relying on the same logic that entitles the rich to

defend their hoarded gold.

Yet we cannot do without love. Vague and corrupted though it may be, we

need to understand it if we intend to practice freedom. More than a

decade after bell hooks called for us to engage with love as a

revolutionary practice, we are still in danger of making the same

mistakes as past generations—pressing love into service as an excuse for

passivity or violence, or abandoning it in favor of austere militancy

that can only effect social change after the manner of the Bolsheviks.

To understand love, we can begin by understanding everything it is not.

We know a lot of about the opposite of love. We see it flourishing in

all forms of domination, control, and exploitation. These impulses have

shaped our world for centuries, pushing colonial troops into every

continent, tearing up swaths of rainforest and releasing poisons into

our rivers and oceans, imprisoning and murdering countless people.

Writing on the rise of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt emphasizes that

one of the necessary preconditions is an atomized society in which our

connections to each other have been severed and nothing has value except

as a commodity. It is easy to destroy whatever has been stripped of

meaning, whatever feels alien to us, without feeling we are losing

anything. It is this chasm in our social relations (which include our

connections to animals and forests and mountains) that crystallizes a

sense of us vs. them, the position that Arendt identifies as toxic—a

fundamental precursor to wars of extermination.

In response to all this, some have valorized the insurrectionary virtues

of passionate love as a disruptive force in society; others have lauded

friendship as the strongest building block of the revolutionary social

program. But neither of these manifestos goes into detail about how and

why love fails us, and what to do when it does.

There is a fundamental difference between love as something we feel and

love as something we do. As bell hooks writes, expecting love to provide

us with a steady state of bliss and security “only keeps us stuck in

wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of love—which is to

transform us.” If we understand revolutionary love not as a feeling but

a choice, a way of orienting ourselves toward the other and the world at

large, we can escape the logic of love as commodity.

But if love demands that we transform ourselves, what does it ask us to

become? Must we abandon militancy? Must we leave off punching Nazis?

Does overcoming the “us vs. them” framework that Arendt identifies mean

we must invite the police into our protests and offer an olive branch to

white supremacists? In short—does practicing love mean sacrificing our

power?

The pacifist who would force “peace and love” on demonstrators is second

kin to the abuser who excuses his attempts to control and dominate as

expressions of love. Good liberals who oppose confrontational resistance

see the monster hiding in the shadows, but that monster is within

themselves. Alleging that those who act directly against oppression must

be poisoned by hatred, they enshrine cowardice as the proof of love.

They can’t imagine fierceness and care inhabiting the same person, much

less a social body that fights according to ethical principles of shared

power to dismantle hierarchies. Love is not powerlessness,

self-sacrifice, or keeping your hands clean. Love is courage. This far,

if no further, we must agree with a certain doctor who acknowledged, in

the least ridiculous moment of his life, that “the revolutionary is

guided by great feelings of love.”

What does it mean to be guided by such feelings, then? Love is a quality

of attention, a sensitivity to the world and everything that is possible

in it. When we fight on the basis of what we love, rather than in

service of ideology or cowardice, we open ourselves to serve as a

channel through which everything beautiful in the world can defend

itself. To choose love is to choose to keep feeling the blows when

others are under attack—everyone facing felony charges, everyone

threatened with deportation, everyone facing water cannons at Standing

Rock, all the rivers and animals and plants that sustain us despite all

the violence inflicted upon them. Love is not reducible to peace. If you

mean it, say it with barricades.