On love as revolution
Love isn't just about romance. It can be a political act, a liberating force, and a horizon for a better world.
The book that I’m currently writing, Loveconomics, engages with the rich intellectual tradition of political love.
In this thinking, love is more than smooching on the sofa with your boyf (yes I did grow up reading Just Seventeen in the 90s), or the glue that sticks families together.
Black radical thinkers and other freedom fighters have developed the concept of love as something extending into the public sphere, as deeply collective and political.
In this post, I want to sketch out what I see as three ways of thinking about political love that can help us build a better life for ourselves and for everyone: love as a vision for a better world, a political practice, and a force for liberation.
Love as a vision for a better world
Saying out loud that you long for a world where we live in peace, love and harmony, seems almost taboo. It’s definitely slightly embarrassing. But Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t ashamed.
His idea of ‘Beloved Community’ was a vision for a society where all people are valued, cared for, and live in peace and justice. He wrote: “The end which we seek to create is a society in which all men [sic] will be able to live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.”
One of the aims of Loveconomics is to start thinking through what an economics based on love could actually look like. It’s a vision for love on a systemic level.
Part of capitalism’s attack on us all has been an onslaught on our imagination. We have it drilled into us that ‘there is no alternative’. We’re made to feel silly for even wanting to dream of something better. Well, if Dr. King can do it, so can we.
Love as a political practice
Of course, turning that dream into a reality is another story. That’s where it’s helpful to think of love as a practice.
I was in my twenties when I first started thinking about love as more than a feeling. I’d be having a fight with a boyfriend and fuming because I felt that he had hurt me or not considered my basic needs in some way.
I would say something along the lines of ‘you’re supposed to care about me, you’re supposed to love me’. He’d respond, ‘but I do love you, I love you immensely’. And I’d say, ‘you might think you feel that way but just feeling it means jack shit to me, you actually have to do it’.
(Obviously I was always in the right in these disputes and was never acting out of a deep sense of abandonment caused by insecure attachment...)
The point is that I was articulating that love is more than a feeling. It’s a verb, an action, a doing word. It was years later that I discovered that this is what bell hooks’ classic 1999 book All About Love is all about. hooks developed an ethics of love that we can actively practice both in our most intimate relationships and our communities.
Any true politics of love has to embrace everyone in the whole world, insisting that we are all equally human and worthy of respect. This means standing for certain basic values that one might hope would be pretty obvious. Like, oh I don’t know, genocide isn’t ok for anyone.
Love as a force for liberation
‘Love liberates’, Maya Angelou famously wrote. Anyone who has experienced love knows what a powerful force it can be. Becoming a mum to my baby girl feels like she cracked me open and made love shine out of every cell.
And in a sense, that is what really happened. Love can change you on a biochemical level. It can alter your hormones, your cells, the plasticity of your brain. It ain’t messing around.
Love at that intensity can be overwhelming. When I first had Essie, I couldn’t bear knowing about other people’s suffering. I just wanted to shut down, to create a bubble to protect my little family.
But I always knew that that wasn’t sustainable. I couldn’t stop thinking about that primal promise I make to my baby every day, still now when she’s two, to keep her safe and provide for her, and about all those millions of people who feel just like me but can’t keep their loved ones safe from unspeakable suffering. People just like me. Babies just like mine.
How long can you go on trying to block out images of starving Palestinian children while trying to get your kid to eat borlotti beans?
So slowly, I’ve started letting myself channel love’s force into practice. Going to that protest, signing that petition, joining that community meeting. Writing this post.
I’d like for the rest of this post to be a community effort, with you. Let’s create a resource for practices of love that we can draw on according to our own needs and abilities. I’ll get us started with a few bullet points and I’d love for you to add more in the comments. Here goes:
- organises Beloved Community gatherings in Seattle, USA.
- has interviewed hundreds of community leaders.
My friend Crystal, a Loveconomics subscriber, organises an intersectional feminist collective in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and gives a course on Whiteness.
One from my mum — get to know your neighbours and share your needs with each other.
Read
’s books on disability justice and care work.My friend Stevie, a Loveconomics subscriber, helps organise an international playgroup in Nijmegen that has been a lifeline.
Parents for Palestine organises a family bloc at the London marches for Palestine.
Now you…
I'm a member of Manchester Trans Liberation Assembly - we try to make sure all our meetings have food because sharing a meal is a form of loving care that our members don't always have access to and full bellies make it easier to listen to one another with love and attention.
Thanks for this thought provoking and caring essay! Perhaps nothing enacts the values of our society as much as how money is created and allocated. Money is not a thing, a commodity. It is a social practice. It circulates, like life blood, through the bodies of our societies. I once gave a presentation for the American Monetary Institute, on how we could have monetary practices that embody care—love! That is certainly not the global monetary system we now have. This one creates money when private banks make loans. So money exists on the back of debt servitude. And serves mainly to enrich already wealthy investors and corporations, and to further only their interests. Money practices would embody care if money is created debt free, when public monetary authorities spend money into existence rather than lending it into existence. Only then will we have enough funding for adequate healthcare, quality foods, affordable housing, infrastructure, education, and shoring up the environment, our planetary home. So, please find the organizations in your country working to transform money. In my country, the United States, it is the Alliance for Just Money, and the American Monetary Institute. And let’s remember, money is love only when it circulates, not when it is hoarded. ❤️