#richard gilman opalsky

[beguines]

Claudia Rankine interviewed by Lauren Berlant / Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value

#love stories #compilation

[yenpet-yenaet]

also see: Purgatorio 17 (or rather Robin Kirkpatrick's footnote on it)

#own post

[peachblossomspecial]

There are many potential becomings. So one must love who and what the other is at the actual stage of development. The love can grow with the person. There is always the risk that the beloved will no longer be loved in the future. People do not want to confess this because they want to believe that if they love a person deeply, they will love that person no matter who or what they become. But there is always the possibility that the other will become a being for whom your love is not possible.

- Richard Gilman-Opalsky

[eelhound]

"[Erich] Fromm challenges conventional discourses on love, noting: 'Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.' Fromm's goal is to overturn this proprietary understanding of love. We must stop looking on love as something to acquire and possess, to hold and have like a private property. People have become accustomed to thinking about everything that they want in terms of exchange and acquisition. But for Fromm, love is an action, not an exchange relation."

- Richard Gilman-Opalsky, from The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, 2020.

#richard gilman opalsky #quote #quotations #erich fromm #love #relationships #agape love #praxis #taking action #democratic socialism #communism #possessions #consumerism #capitalism

[third-nature]

"What do revolt and love have in common? A cursory reflection reveals a few interesting commonalities: First, both love and revolt go in search of others with whom to make common cause. Both love and revolt throw people together with feeling and purpose. Second, both love and revolt disrupt the present state of affairs. They discombobulate everyday life, usual composure, and the interpersonal order, yet their upheavals always suggest something hopeful on the horizon. One is provoked by both love and revolt to wonder about hopeful possibilities. Possible does not mean inexorable. Franco Berardi uses the term 'futurability' to think about possible futures that may or may not become realities, saying that 'the possible is immanent, but it's unable to develop into a process of actualization.' Love and revolt both propose actualizations from possibility, yet they are largely experienced as immanence. Finally, both love and revolt counteract alienation, isolation, and privatization inasmuch as both tend to create new arrangements of sociality. With both love and revolt, we may speak of a new generation of the Gemeinwesen, meaning community, communal being, communal sensibility, or commonwealth, and of the Gemeingeist as a common, collective spirit capable of expressing itself in the world."

Richard Gilman-Opalsky

#richard gilman-opalsky #quote #the communism of love #love #revolt #situationism #anti capitalism

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

...we have to learn how to see the practice of love in moments of riot, revolt, and insurrection. What do love and revolt have in common? Both love and revolt go in search of others with whom to make common cause. They discombobulate everyday life, usual composure, and the interpersonal order, yet their upheavals always suggest something hopeful on the horizon.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Your Love is a Communist!

#Richard Gilman-Opalsky #love

[redshift-13]

https://www.akpress.org/communismoflove.html

Now available for preorder at 25% off list price! Order now and we'll ship as soon as the book is released.

"Fabulous! A wonderful idea, superbly carried out. After the horrors of the 'communism' of the last century, we need to talk of a Communism of Love, work out what it means and find the paths we make by walking in that direction. Against the tick-tock of capitalist doom, we urgently need to reinvent-rediscover our own tradition of going in the opposite direction, towards a Communism of Love. This book speeds us on our way."—John Holloway, author of We Are the Crisis of Capital

"The philosophy of Gilman-Opalsky gives new life to the word 'love,' which has been trivialized by advertising and fake sentimentalism. Those young people who are opening their eyes on the sad world that capitalism has cooked up for them, and those of us who are gathering and rebelling together, will find in this book the ideas that we need to overcome our despair."—Franco “Bifo” Berardi, author of Futurability

Exploring the meanings and powers of love from Ancient Greece to the present day, Richard Gilman-Opalsky argues that what is called “love” by the best thinkers to have approached the subject is in fact the beating heart of communism—that is, communism understood as a human yearning and way of life, not as a form of government. Along the way, he reveals with clarity that the capitalist method of assigning value to things is incapable of appreciating what humans treasure most. Capitalism cannot value the experiences and relationships that make our lives worth living; it can only destroy love by turning it into a commodity.

The Communism of Love follows the struggles of love in different contexts of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and shows how the aspiration for love is as close as we may get to a universal communist aspiration.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of five previous books, including Specters of Revolt and Precarious Communism.

More praise for The Communism of Love:

“A wonderfully evocative and thought-provoking book, a real gift to us all. Readers will be inspired and transformed throughout, seeing illustrated and philosophized how our love does and can break capitalist value production. Grounded and groundbreaking—this is a must read for all who want new social relations based in care and trust.”—Marina Sitrin, author of They Can’t Represent Us!

“In this beautifully crafted book, Richard Gilman-Opalsky persuasively uncovers and explores an ‘irreducibly antagonistic relationship of love to capitalist exchange value.’ Refusing to submit to the all-too-common reduction of love to sex, he points to the emergence of communist love during moments of uprising and resistance. In so doing, he illuminates the future of revolution.”—George Katsiaficas, activist and author of The Subversion of Politics

“Gilman-Opalsky’s The Communism of Love is a magisterial work comprised of a dialectics of love that ranges from an unsparing critique of treatises on romantic love, to a critical engagement with changing conceptions of love in the wake of precarity, individualism and the globalization of capitalism. In a book that is breathtaking in its range and attention to detail, the author settles on an approach that stresses love’s ‘rival logic of relationality,’ of being-in-the-world, of activating feeling, of cultivating a non-capitalist vocation of becoming more fully human. This is a courageous book that is not afraid to examine the dark side of love and its relationship to violence, brutality and loss of meaning. Most importantly, Gilman-Opalsky develops the possibilities inherent in a communist love, one that both denounces injustice and at the same time announces a new world of possibilities for communal being."—Peter McLaren, author of Pedagogy of Insurrection

#ak press #forthcoming books #new books #communism #political theory #love #left politics #Richard Gilman-Opalsky

[forbidden-sorcery]

In the twentieth century, states did not even come close to solving the problems of capital or inequality, although many tried. To sharpen this point, we observe that today racism flourishes and flares up everywhere in response to immigrants, refugees, and uprisings of black and brown people around the world. Sexism rages on and is even extended and emboldened in reaction to new challenges confronting sanctioned norms of gender and sexuality. Inequality and poverty have only grown worldwide, despite the liberal reformism of governors everywhere. So many states have thrown their weight in the direction of solving these problems, but either they do not really want to or they cannot succeed (or maybe both). Moreover, states have invariably repressed, co-opted, and contaminated, criminalized, or outright combated the revolutionary energies of society. Government prefers to divert revolutionary energies into its own parties and institutions to instrumentalize social disaffection for its own purposes

John Asimakopoulos and Richard Gilman-Opalsky - Against Capital In The Twenty-First Century

#John Asimakopoulos #Richard Gilman-Opalsky #anti-capitalism

[alwaysalreadyangry]

have started reading specters of revolt (that spelling looks Extremely Wrong to me, usa wyd) and i am on p2 and am already very into it

#specters of revolt #Richard gilman-opalsky #theory

[dumbrecords]

1-28-17: THE JUDAS ISCARIOT / SEEIN’ RED - SPLIT LP

#coalition records #the judas iscariot #richard gilman-opalsky #the specters of revolt #seein' red

[beguines]

Love, we are often told, is beyond all politics and should not be shrunk down to anything political. And love is commonly held to be more about ineffable feeling than thought. These bad ideas have contaminated discussions of love for too long, and we have tried to repudiate them in the present study. Love is a power, and for that reason we cannot sequester it from all politics or keep it trapped in theological and mystical privacy. Love is not a neutral power that agrees with everything. But love lives precariously in a world that vacillates between not knowing what it is and subjecting it to the values of capital.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value

#richard gilman-opalsky #the communism of love

[blacksheepspringfield]

Last night's talk/discussion by Richard Gilman-Opalsky on his book "Specters of Revolt" was great, more punk lectures and discussion in DIY spaces for 2017! 📓📝📕#professorpunk #seeyouinclass (at Black Sheep Cafe)

#seeyouinclass #professorpunk

[teachanarchy]

Insurrections Vol. 1

Watch and share our newly launched short film series on insurrections featuring philosophers and theorists Farhang Erfani, Joshua Clover and Richard Gilman-Opalsky. In volume 1, we explore the two sides in a riot: communicative and practical; the insurrection as a form of philosophy from below, and the future of insurrections. Upcoming volumes will discuss the protests and street battles against neo-fascism in the U.S.; where the movement of the squares succeeded and failed; and what forces are driving protest and insurrections today.

#government #politics #riots #insurrection #anarchism #organizing

[eelhound]

"The possibility of the other person standing before you, face-to-face, represents a moment of terror, a moment of truth, and a possible transformation of the relationship (even its end). Levinas insists on the face-to-face because it presents the other as a reality 'effectuated in the non-postponable urgency with which he requires a response.' When the other appears through a distant communiqué, through an old physical letter, an email, or some technological mediation, the other waits for a response but lacks the presence to demand it. The body is in this way a force, sometimes a necessary one, and not a dispensable or superficial feature of human relations.

This is why we often need to go places, with and in our physical bodies, not only in friendship but also in politics and protest. The presence of the body — or bodies — demands a response. Governments and their militaries, for example, may learn through screens how much they are hated by their people, but they need not respond until bodies confront them face-to-face, in the square, in the streets, as obstructions to commerce and normal business. In this political example, if we were to conclude that the face to-face is an old-fashioned ultimate situation, we would imply that the power of our bodies is also old-fashioned.

But don't our bodies remain fundamental to our being-in-the-world? Why not meet the lover only through a screen? Why not attend every conference only at home by video calls? The answer is that we want to bring our bodies to places and people because bodies are part of the indispensable apparatus of human relationality, even today where connections are more disembodied and cellular than ever. Even if we do not need to be at the conference physically or to go to the family's house in a distant city because we can talk by video calls, we still want to go there because we recognize that as the ultimate situation. Similarly, in politics, if we really want to stop them, we will eventually need to place our bodies on the line. Speaking of a strike is not the same thing as materializing one in picket lines."

- Richard Gilman-Opalsky, from The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, 2020.

#richard gilman opalsky #quote #quotations #human body #relationships #in person #politics #political organizing #democratic socialism #protest #labor strikes #presence #emmanuel levinas #activism #marxism #communism #socializing #human nature #zoom calls

[depersonalization-nation]

“Opinion polls claims to present what the public thinks, when in fact they actually construct the public using calculations that add up privately held opinions, processed with expedience, through surveys. But public opinion is not the sum total of private opinion. Private opinion reflects the interests of private persons thinking and speaking as individuals, whereas public opinion expresses and embodies a collective interest, collectively assessed. For public opinion, there must actually be a cohesive public sphere that can consider the issues in a public forum of some kind, and can formulate a collective perspective that is distinguished from the perspective of individuals as such. This is an old piece of common sense expressed by philosophers from Plato, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel to Arendt, Habermas, and Baudrillard, and yet our opinion polls continue to ignore the difference. In fact, the social “science” of polling has managed a remarkable trick — it can present us with public opinion in the absence of an actually existing public!”

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord & the Practice of Radical Philosophy

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

It is perhaps the experience and practice of love - more than anything else in a human life - the reveals the inestimable extent to which the best things under capitalism are the least capitalist things.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Your Love is a Communist!

#Richard Gilman-Opalsky #love