At a time when the lives of trans people, migrant workers, and women, amongst others, are threatened by the far Right, it is important to engage with the demands and analyses of these groups, both on their own terms and as part of the broader struggle against the relations of capital. This necessitates an expansive definition of capitalist alienation, which extends beyond the point of production and penetrates every facet of our lives. Alan Sears’ new book Eros and Alienation brings together the Marxist theory of alienation and queer theory and argues that the alienation of labour has subordinated our creative, life-making activity to the production of capitalist profit, including the ways that we experience gender and sexuality. But this process is never total, and the potential for the realisation of our capacity for human flourishing is expressed in various ways, exemplified in queer forms of community and struggle that defend and create the possibility of a different future. In the conversation that follows, Alan discusses themes from his new book, including an expansive conception of alienation, the role of the erotic in overcoming capitalist alienation, and the utopian vision of the future.
Alan Sears has been writing about social change and the state, as well as queer Marxism, since the mid-1980s. He was a professor in the department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. His notable works before Eros and Alienation include The Next New Left: A History of the Future and The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century, co-authored with James Cairns. His research is deeply intertwined with his activist engagements in queer movements and his writing has engaged both academic and activist audiences.
Alan Sears was interviewed by Sean K. Isaacs and Isadora Seconi.
How did you come to the idea and development of this book?
This book was a long time coming in a lot of ways. Its birth was probably when I started as a graduate student at Carleton University in the early 1980s, where I became much more active in the queer organisation on campus, which, at the time, was called Gay People at Carleton (the next year, lesbian was added, and the language has changed since then). I also joined the International Socialists (IS), which was a Marxist organisation, and I became active as a Marxist. I’d been active broadly in the left since high school, in different ways, but mainly in the New Democratic Party (NDP). So, this was both a move to the left and a move towards becoming more actively engaged in queer politics. Those two things, queer politics and Marxism, were together in my mind but not always reconciled. The actions that I was involved in around queer issues were often not explicitly Marxist, and there was a lot of Marxist work that was very unaware of queer politics
So, I began having to puzzle the connections together myself. It was at this time that I attended a great seminar on Marx’s theory where we read a lot of Marx, including his early works on alienation. As a graduate student, I began to playfully think about how alienation related to sexuality. Recently, I found my old copy of early writings of Karl Marx, and I found “human sensuous practice” underlined.
However, it took a long time for me to come back to these ideas. I pursued other ideas with my dissertation. Over the process of trying to reconcile these ideas, I began to become more systematic in my approach to thinking queerness and alienation together. I began incorporating ideas from social-reproduction theory, ecological Marxism, and other things that influenced me, and this brought me back to the ideas that I’d been working on for a long time.
How is this book related to your other works?
I’ve been a bit all over the place in terms of writing. For my MA and my PhD, I ended up working a lot on the state. My interest in state and social policy grew out of the fact that I had worked in social services between my undergraduate and graduate studies, and this continued through grad school. So, my interest in the state actually developed out of working with people coming out of psychiatric care in the late 70s, and thinking through housing policy and what it means for people to reintegrate into a community. My intellectual focus was largely on the state, though I had this other level of biographical and theoretical interests in queerness and Marxism. Because of my AIDS organising, I’d been doing work on public health and the state, and then I began working in education and starting writing on the state and education. So, my interest in the state developed through the type of work I was doing.
I was writing and publishing about queer politics as a part of the Marxist organisations I was a part of, the IS and the New Socialists, but my scholarly work remained separate. Then, I wrote about infrastructures of dissent in The Next New Left, a book about coming together and solidarity. [1] After all that, I had a real craving to come back to what, it seemed to me, I had left unresolved, this more fundamental level of alienation. In some ways, Eros and Alienation ended up integrating a lot of my previous work, even if I hadn’t intended it that way. Once I started asking questions about social reproduction and alienation, the state came back into focus. Collectivity and the infrastructure of dissent also came back.
It wasn’t necessarily my intention to write it as a kind of capstone reflection on different themes, but these themes ended up all coming together here. I think this is one of the interesting things about a vibrant social-reproduction perspective: it makes you ask questions about everything, about what human life is, how do we sustain it, and what relationships help or harm it.
Marxism understands alienation as an estrangement from, and limit to, human realisation. SRT views it as a separation of workers from their labour-power and the subsumption of concrete to abstract labour. How does queer theory help us get a bigger picture of alienation?
A central element, for me, of the Marxist theory of alienation is that it starts with labour broadly understood, the idea that people are makers. We’re world-makers in a multi-dimensional way and that involves physical making, imagination, and collectivity in all kinds of ways. What you find in a lot of Marxist theorising is, as Dorothy Smith argues happened to Marx himself, a move from this more open-ended idea of making into a more narrow definition of labour in terms of productivity for capital.[2] This means that a lot of Marxist work on alienation slips very quickly into the realm of paid employment, the specific relationship with capitalist employment in the workplace, and the loss of our self-realisation in doing subordinated labour.
What I began to reflect on more is how our work as makers is very far from subsumed by the alienated, subordinated labour that we do in paid labour. To start with, there’s all kinds of unpaid labour. As social-reproduction theory highlights, there are a lot of unpaid labour-processes that are also alienated because they’re trapped within the same web of relationships as waged labour. So, there is a need to understand how alienation extends far beyond the work that we do directly for capital. This process is never total and the labour that people do in the household can involve genuine elements of fulfilment that take place in concrete time. But there are always contradictions, because we’re caught within this web of relations where we’re always having to do what’s required to survive.
To me, queerness was a reminder of the erotic elements that are always there, and this is definitely not discussed much in Marxist theories of alienation. Our making includes erotic fulfilment in the broad sense; it’s a form of connection, social connection and embodied fulfilment, which can happen in a range of different ways. Thinking of how the erotic gets separated out from the process of making in so many different ways in capitalist societies gave me a slightly different lens on the different types of work we do in different areas of life, and on what it means to meet our needs in a range of different ways.
Starting from an expanded notion of human life-making activity as permeated by eros and play, how do you view these elements as shaping the process of disalienation? How might this relationship between erotic life-making activity and human realisation be incorporated into a politics which disinvests from the erotic realm in order to reach emancipation?
An important thing is to start with the diversity of human needs. The idea that by centring eros, we are thinking about people in narrow, sexualised ways as sexual actors, does not, to me, correspond to the breadth that is there in eros. Because erotic fulfilment is often inseparable from other kinds, there is a need to genuinely orient around eros as a part of human fulfilment. For instance, drinking a cup of tea may have a whole array of different fulfilments that may include erotic elements. There’s a kind of open-endedness about what is the erotic, especially when people are able to define it for themselves, both individually and collectively.
This broad sense of the erotic as the kind of meeting point of social connection and embodied fulfilment, can be seen in many facets of our lives. Look at the play of children from a very young age, and you will see the open-endedness of their eroticism. They put the world in their mouth, they climb it, they engage with it, they explore it, they work together around it. You can just see that there’s immense pleasure, but also pain generated by all that. Sue Ferguson is writing really great stuff right now about a lot of these themes and the way alienation operates at the level of childhood.[3] So, that broad sense of erotic is everywhere and we bring that to all the different things that we do: gardening, eating, cooking, but also a lot of things that don’t seem immediately pleasurable. Our making always, at least potentially, involves erotic dimensions. By confining making to a kind of productivity in the capitalist sense, to what’s required to survive by trading our human capacities on the capitalist marketplace, alienation narrows the erotic down within our lives and hives it off.
So, to me, when we think of things like asexuality and asexuality activism, it’s not necessarily a-erotic. Especially when we think of the erotic in broader terms, it’s more about people being agents of self-realisation in terms of their own definition of what fulfilment means for them. In capitalist society, however, sexuality is defined in very narrow terms. So, we create a binary between sexual and asexual, because the sexual is defined so narrowly and often not in terms of the erotic needs of the people participating in it. In the broader sense, when we’re talking about a politics of human emancipation, a lot of it involves recognising an open-endedness about so many of the things that we think are hardwired into human bodies. People will say that sex, in the sense of sexual activity, is biologically determined, lots of species do it. But, as humans, these things always have an open-endedness and are about being an agent in your own bodily self-realisation, which always involves collective and individual dimensions. We need to be asking ourselves what self-realisation actually means and how we can organise together to maximise it. This involves all kinds of other questions, including democratic determination and the ecological consequences of our way of life.
Under capitalism, we are insulated from a sense of responsibility for the ecological consequences of what we’re doing, because we feel helpless to influence what’s happening at an ecological level. We can do the most minor things, like putting something into a recycling bin as opposed to not, but we often feel unable to deal with the broader questions about our destructive relationship to the ecosystem. So, to me, collective organising and the seizure of the means of production, the collective and democratic remaking of society, insurgency from below in all areas of life and work, gives us the means to begin to define self-realisation for ourselves. This definition is opposed to that of self-realisation through the narrow lens of productivity for capital, which constrains the definition of what is sexual and what’s erotic, even if we don’t realise how that’s happening.
Certainly, ideas of sexuality or asexuality, to me, are a product of an idea of sexuality as a system that imposes certain forms of conformity on us and asks us to meet its standards, as opposed to starting with our own wants and needs, individually and collectively. As Chris Chitty shows, the idea of erotic enclosure is parallel to the idea of enclosure as it happened to land.[4] This idea is based in the fact that the erotic gets hived off, and then we develop an idea of sexuality as if it had its own dynamics that are almost external to us, where we are trading on our capacities to do what’s required to be sexual, as opposed to starting with our own definitions – collective and individual – of what our needs are.
The workplace is, even though it’s filled with sexual harassment and sexual violence, officially a place that is outside of sexuality. But the workplace is also where sexuality is proscribed in many ways, where the erotic is separated from work, and work is supposed to be just for a wage. Through this process, sexuality develops its own dynamics and becomes an area of shame. Part of the idea of the privatisation of sexuality is that it’s supposed to be invisible, and we can notice this all the time. We can notice it in the way that people are unable to even communicate to intimate partners about desires and wants, because there’s such shame surrounding the complexity of it. The menu of needs from which you’re allowed to choose has already been printed. While it changes under capitalism because of feminist struggles, anti-racist struggles, queer struggles, and so on, the pervasiveness of violence remains, especially violence against women and gendered violence. There’s so much that stops it from being a real, erotic realisation of our needs.
The reason why I used fiction in some ways in the book, is because there’s an open-endedness in the process of fiction-writing that often isn’t there in social-theory writing. It makes us able to talk about what things may look like a couple generations from now. In situations of liberation, what will erotic self-realisation, mean to people? I don’t even know if we can answer that, but we can know that it’s going to be way different than it is now.
In your engagement with Marxist ecology, you argue that a return to an untouched “first nature” is neither possible nor desirable, but that overcoming the exploitative metabolic relation of “second nature” is only possible through developing a “third nature” of disalienated human activity and a disalienated relationship between human beings and the natural world. What is the basis of the parallel between the commodification of nature and the making of bodies as human products? Recognising the potential of queer and trans self-formation to contribute to the development of this “third nature,” what are the elements that make these embodiments different from normative and alienating ones?
As I was writing the chapter on ecology, I kept coming back to the idea of nature within and nature without, and how they’re integrally connected. Our sense of our own embodiment and our relationship with the ecosystem around us are deeply related, and alienation affects both. I was reading Leanne Simpson’s work on ecology through the lens of Indigeneity, which describes “an ecology of intimacy”, or relations of reciprocity with other humans, other species, and other living things.[5] This is the relationship that is understood in the cosmos of her Nation and the web of relations that they are bound in. Capitalist dispossession, and that’s my language, not Leanne Simpson’s specifically, involves the deliberate destruction of those webs of intimacy through brutal violence. This includes genocidal dimensions, and we see that in Palestine right now, but also in terms of the relationship of the Canadian state to First Nations. The deliberate destruction of those mutual relations and the world around them, casts us out, leaving us culturally and socially isolated. We’re left naked and needy, with only the capitalist market remaining to overcome that nakedness and neediness.
What does it mean to rediscover the collectivity, the mutuality, the reciprocity that allows us to become comfortable with both nature within and with nature without, and to recognise the open-endedness that’s there in terms of self-realisation? This goes beyond the idea that you need to aspire to look like the body on the poster in the mall because that is what a desirable person looks like. It’s about the possibilities of self-making, and we don’t entirely know where that will lead. For instance, when we talk about things like transness, the future of gender in human society is completely open-ended, but we need to exist in a situation where people actually feel like the possibilities of self-realisation are truly open-ended. To me, that requires the democratic seizure of the means of production from below. Through that process of insurgency, it becomes possible to begin to do the work of reparation to account for where people have ended up, to account for the multi-generational damage that has occurred under capitalism, both in terms of genocidal destruction and in terms of the relationship with external nature. As we go through this process of disalienation, we rediscover the creative capacities to self-realise in all kinds of different ways, collectively and individually.
I think getting beyond that idea of state is central. This requires looking at how active social policy is in informing our senses of possibilities in ways that we aren’t necessarily aware of. For instance, the education system from Kindergarten to Grade 12 is about producing certain forms of embodiment, certain ideas of expertise, certain ideas of what practice is. All those kinds of things get deep inside us. To move beyond it is not a question of better schools, but a question of rethinking education from the ground up. I think ideas of third nature are useful here, as well as for rethinking the health-care system. It would be difficult to think that a socialist self-making in terms of health is going to throw out everything that was learned by capitalist medicine, because things like certain kinds of surgery, certain kinds of vaccines, can make people’s lives better. So, what does it mean to take over those knowledges, but put them in such a different setting that it doesn’t look like the same thing, with the same roles like the doctor, the surgeon, and so on? Certainly, these roles will not be the same in a postcapitalist situation, and they couldn’t be, because the current roles don’t address our issues properly, in terms of our own health. I’m just using that as an example, but once we move beyond that and see how the state operates, not only containing but also generating concepts, I think the open-endedness that is there makes us more aware of the way that the state forms our senses of possibilities. It will also make us more aware of the sense of possibility that goes beyond what’s there now, including the state form.
The notion of combined and uneven development challenges the modern view of linear progress that some strains of Marxism have based their idea of emancipation around. Similarly, queer Marxism has challenged the idea that sexual freedom has expanded in a linear fashion. How do these non-linear views of capitalist development and sexuality intersect, and how do they contribute to an enriched understanding of capitalist totality?
Thinking of human life in linear ways is, in a lot of ways, a product of capitalist relations. It’s not that it was never there in other types of society but, historically, human life has often been thought of in cyclical terms. If you look at a lot of the understandings of different cultures, time is viewed in terms of cycles, ranging from the cycle of life, to the year as a cycle. These cycles don’t move forward in a line of progress but come back to the point of departure, as the seasons do for example. It’s not the same thing to go through winter again, partly because winter is different, partly because you’re different, but you do go through winter again. I think that the idea of a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between cycles and lines is actually hugely important for us in terms of recovering human relationships. The unilinear developmental understanding of history is very specifically a product of capitalist developmentalism. The nature of capitalism is such that various kinds of technological development and restructuring are required for profit, and it is these developments that drive this idea of progress. It’s obviously not just me that saying this; it’s everyone from Walter Benjamin to a whole range of different people.[6]
We need to be questioning the whole idea of progress that, unfortunately, has gotten built into a lot of Marxist accounts, and understand a more complex mapping. Part of the reason that it’s so important to understand past insurgencies is that you lose a sense of the transformative agency from below when you don’t see a lot of militancy around you. By recognising all these different kinds of ways that people mobilise together, you realise that, when people come together and struggle, they often end up in places that they didn’t think they would, because of the open-endedness of the revolutionary process. This open-endedness can be found if you look at all kinds of different revolutionary struggles, in all kinds of different places.
In situations of mass insurgency, where people have ground existing capitalist ways to a halt, general strikes or the occupation of space in new ways, they begin conversing with each other because it’s urgent. There’s a necessity in that kind of situation for people to establish new lines of communication, ranging from the micro level of networks of people who are together in a workplace or community, through to the largest scale organising. They begin to ask different kinds of questions, and the horizons keep expanding, because the possibilities go way beyond what might have started as a strike for wages, or a fight for women’s equality.
The horizons expand, and the possibilities keep expanding. To me, combined and uneven development has a lot to say on this topic. The mapping of a unilinear idea of global development, which has been incredibly Eurocentric, is not going to be the map forward from here. Our compass needs to understand a much more complex kind of development, where things that are happening elsewhere, in all kinds of different ways, can reinvent and recreate new maps of possibility.
While Marxist politics have often been opposed to utopian views of the future, you explicitly connect the idea of a queer utopia with a socialist horizon. The potential of queer utopias lies in the fact that their foundations are not purely speculative but are derived from a stratification of past emancipatory practices and experiences. What kind of roadblocks are we able to avoid through this approach to revolution that we would otherwise find in a traditional Marxist framework?
A lot of the Marxist politics around utopia come from writings of Marx and others in the nineteenth-century, and it was a very specific response to a particular kind of utopianism, a purely idealist dream of a better world. There were, at times, depending on the fantasy of the person involved, exciting elements to these dreams but there was no concern with how to get there. So, Marx, in many ways, was rightly critical of that, arguing that genuine routes to emancipation always start with where we are materially. Otherwise, you’re not really talking about what the concrete forces are that can be mobilised to achieve the utopian vision. Without this grounding in concrete reality, utopianism can, at times, be even worse than useless. It can actually hold us back, because it disavows the struggles in the present that are so far from that utopia.
These struggles in the present are often kind of dirty, in the sense that they’re caked in the mud of the world we’re living in right now – and they have to be. It has to be about very concrete things, like wages. Just to take one example: union struggles. At times, they have very little of the element of the utopian in them, at least in the present moment. Another dollar isn’t utopian, and it’s getting us nowhere in that direction, because it’s not changing fundamental relations. Reading Ernst Bloch brought together the idea that you can map together the possibilities and the struggles of the present with the possibilities of the future.[7]
At the same time, I was realising that the path-breaking queer work, at least in the English language, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often very influenced by utopian socialism. So, even though I had learned, as a properly trained Marxist, to disavow utopianism, it was interesting to realise – and Sheila Rowbotham has written about this – the utopian socialists were often better than the Marxists around issues of gender and sexuality.[8] Marxists often had a too narrowly framed perspective of human experience focused around capital, leading them to disregard issues that didn’t have to do with capitalist production and productivity from the point of view of capital.
We can recognise that there’s a lot that we need to reclaim from the utopian tradition and recognise also that our insurgency is only going to be genuinely open-ended if we dare to think beyond the now. Otherwise, the solution is some kind of techno-utopia, where it just becomes an acceleration of what’s there now, with some of the bad stuff removed, as opposed to an openness to the fact that human creative making can lead us in a whole new set of directions. So, how do we open ourselves, both to the bold thinking about human open-endedness, which I think, unfortunately, some versions of historical materialism lose, and, at the same time, have the concreteness of historical materialism, the fact that insurgency isn’t just something we dream about? Revolution isn’t just a wild, wet dream. The forces are there, they’re just asleep right now. How does that happen? How do people become tame? Those are huge questions for us to ask. I think that vibrant utopianism opens up that sense of possibility that is so important for animating our struggles and for creating a sense of boldness in our struggles.
You present a picture of everyday life that is partially autonomous from the forces of capital and highlight the possibility of pockets of resistance in everyday politics. What is the role of queer theory in informing the importance of everyday life? Do you think this approach is different from other views on social reproductive politics?
Because alienation isn’t total, there are always elements of human open-endedness that creep through in everyday life. We have to deal with the fact that we have to trade on our capacities to get what we need to survive in society, and yet we are still human makers. We are still creating, making, and imagining. Within the private realm of the capitalist household, we are responsible for our own reproduction, in some ways, and this creates spaces of possibility. These spaces of possibility are certainly not intended by capital, and employers and state policymakers try to use social policy and all kinds of means to make sure we don’t fully realise the possibilities of those spaces. They try to make sure that open-ended processes of self-making don’t take place, but they can never shut it down completely. The richness of that self-making is something that goes way beyond the dominant heteronormative family form.
I think a lot of social-reproduction theory developed as a corrective to a Marxism that was overly centred on what is sometimes called, in Marxist theory, the point of production, or the places of capitalist production. SRT opened it up to unwaged labour in the household, or low paid reproductive work, and the whole realm of reproductive and service work. But it hasn’t necessarily asked deep enough questions about self-making, in terms of gender, sexuality, community formation, and so on. I think trans and queer communities offer really interesting examples that once you begin to think about, you realise these spaces exist in all kinds of places where people are engaging in self-making. It is, in many ways, a multi-generational project to create possibilities for human life that do not grow out of capitalism, but out of resistance.
Resistance sometimes is overtly political, and sometimes it is simply living the way that you’re told not to, which happens in all kinds of ways. The thing about resistance is it generally takes more than one of us at a time, and that implies community formation. Resistance from below has taken a lot of different forms, and this is where Nat Raha’s work on trans social reproduction is important, looking at the different ways that trans people have created the possibilities of transness through bold, interpersonal, embodied work, but also through building the kind of community that’s necessary to live through a struggle against the normative, and to survive in the most basic senses.[9] That community building that’s there in a bunch of different ways in trans and queer struggles is building on possibilities and needs that are particular to their struggles, but creates possibilities for realization that extend way beyond queer and trans communities.
I find it shocking that some people on the left are saying what we need to do in the face of Trump and the far Right is to get back to a more narrow, class-centric politics, or that the Left has been subsumed by wokeness. Whatever the language, these perspectives are failing to defend the most basic trans rights. If you just look at who Trump, among others, is attacking, it becomes necessary to reflect on what it means for us to think about migrant rights, trans rights, workers’ rights, and so on at the same time. I think that there’s something about the utopian perspective that allows us to think open-endedly about how these things are not zero-sum games cast against one another, but that we are talking about a broader process of human becoming of which all these issues are a part. Transness is not only about trans lives, although the defence of transness is hugely important on its own, but it also offers potential for liberation way beyond the lives of people who are trans themselves, in terms of the way we live in our own bodies and the sense of possibility in self-making.
About the question of the way we live, there’s a lot of concern in various forms of orthodox Marxism about prefigurativeness. I can understand why, because prefigurativeness can often just lead to what amounts to surrender to the horizons of capitalism and a politics of trying to realise what it means to live our best, rebellious life within these horizons. At the same time, if you totally disavow prefigurativeness, you’re not recognising that insurgency is always a process of experimentation, where people are trying on possibilities for the future, because struggle opens new ground for doing that. What you find in a lot of different places, is that as people go into struggle, they begin to create possibilities. This happened through Brazilian resistance to authoritarian or fascist regimes in the 1970 and the formation of the Workers’ Party, where different communities and worker mobilisations resisted immense repression, and that included queer dimensions. A similar thing occurred in the struggle against apartheid South Africa. There are things that have been buried inside, as dreams of self-realisation, and they can come to the surface in new ways. As that happens, people begin to create new possibilities.
If we think about revolutionary politics as an activity of disalienation, both in the present and long term, what elements can we trace in this type of politics to notions of play or the erotic? Do you have any political experience with these elements that comes to mind?
I guess where I would go in the immediate sense is the idea of comradeship. Comrade is a term, at least in English, that has very specific political associations with the Left. When I first joined the IS and people were calling each other comrade, it took me a while to realise that comradeship really matters. Because of growing up in Cold War Canada, my image was the portrayal of the Soviet Union in movies, and the spies who would be saying that to each other. But comradeship has elements of disalienation in it, which isn’t even to say that I like all my comrades or that we all agree on everything, or certainly not that we can or should have erotic relationships with each other, in the sense of sexual relationships. I think that there’s something about communities where you have a connection through projects of transformation that build a kind of bond that is incredibly important and that allows you to see possibilities for different kinds of bonds in the future. To me, one of the exciting things about insurgency and comradeship is that you begin to relate in different ways.
It becomes less transactional than a lot of our relationships are in everyday life, because there is a recognition that we need each other. You recognise that in any good revolutionary organisation, in the broadest sense, there’s no one in it who can do everything that the organisation requires. We all bring different things to it. Some people bring a kind of warmth, other people bring a hard-headedness, some people are able to attend very carefully to the human dimensions of things. People are bringing different things, and as those things come together, something happens that’s greater than any of the individuals involved. You’re beginning to create a transformative agent that is beyond the agency of any individual, and where the possibilities go beyond what anyone brings to the table. I think that’s one of the most beautiful things that happens in revolutionary situations and situations of insurgency at any scale, when there is something that’s going beyond a protest.
I think there were elements of it in the encampments around Palestine last year, and in Occupy. There are elements in every strike, in any situation when you come together in new ways. In a picket-line situation, you may link arms with people who you may not particularly like so you can stop the scabs from going through, and, in that act of physical resistance, you may develop a different kind of relationship. That still may not mean you like each other or want to spend a lot of time together outside of that moment but, to me, one of the things that’s really beautiful about situations of struggle is that we begin to recognise the interdependence of our outcomes. One of the things that capitalism is so powerful at is dissolving that sense of the interdependence of our outcomes. Through struggle we can learn that we need one another. We learn that this means we need to value what each other brings. We certainly learn that there are excluded voices that are not here right now because of things that we have done over time, and we learn that if we think that revolution can happen without those who are absent, we’re not doing revolution at all. So, I think a lot of that sense of responsibility and collectivity is the basis of hope.
You see that at all kinds of different scales. You can see it at its boldest, at these moments where people are reclaiming space on a massive scale, which is what happens in revolutionary processes, but even in the smallest scale of play, or at times at a concert, we can have a taste of this around us. This definitely feels like the worst period that I’ve seen in a lot of ways, globally, but the reason that I can still have confidence in revolution, even though it doesn’t feel very imminent right now, is because when people come together you can see the special, open-ended, collective power that they bring and that sense of shared outcomes, which is, to me, the central part of socialist transformation.
[1] Sears, A. (2014). The Next New Left: A History of the Future. Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing.
[2] Smith, D. E. (1990). The Conceptual Practice of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
[3] Ferguson, S. (2017). ‘Children, Childhood and Capitalism: A Social Reproductive Perspective’. In T. Bhattacharya (Ed.), Social reproduction theory: Remapping class, recentering oppression (pp. 112-130). London: Pluto Press.
[4] Chitty, C. (2020). Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy and Capital in the Rise of the World System. Durham: Duke University Press.
[5] Simpson, L. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[6] Benjamin, W. (1969f) [1955]. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations: Essays and reflections (pp. 253-264). New York: Schocken Books.
[7] Bloch, E. (2000). The Spirit of Utopia. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
[8] Rowbotham, S. (1992). Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It. London: Pluto Press,
[9] Raha, N., & van der Drift, M. (2024). Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. London: Pluto Press.
