Making Sense of Revolutionary Love
I spent the last moon reading the most recent book by Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, and I've been thinking a great deal about, with, and through her concepts of the “captive maternal” and “revolutionary love”.
The text below is a “concept note” to help readers unfamiliar with Joy James's work make sense of the aforementioned concepts, as I plan to rely on the concepts in future dispatches.
Performer in an njorowe, a pregnant belly mask.
Slave masters, capitalists, and colonizers are parasitic beings. They sustain and pleasure themselves by extracting from and destroying the bodies, the minds, the spirits, and the lands of the captive peoples whom they violently (re-)make into chattel slaves, wage slaves, and colonized subjects.
Slave masters, capitalists, and colonizers have managed to sustain and pleasure themselves in this way for centuries by ensuring the minimum social reproduction of their victims: exploiting their victims’ capacities to give birth, to love, and to care for one another despite suffering the exploitative indignities of dispossession, denigration, and deprivation.
Captive lovers and captive maternals are those chattel slaves, wage slaves, and colonized subjects whose capacity for (re-)birth and for loving and caring are exploited to effectively ensure the social reproduction of ever more chattel slaves, wage slaves, and colonized subjects. Captive lovers and captive maternals provide the minimal love and care that is socially necessary to enable their fellow victims of slavery and colonization to endure their exploitation without starving, succumbing to illness, burning out, losing their minds, committing suicide, or self-destructively lashing out against their oppressors. Our captive lovers and captive maternals enable us to sleep, to wake up, and to labor, day after day, even when all we can expect from every next day is the continuation of our oppression.
The Hollywood Imagination often celebrates captive love and captive maternity. It celebrates the romantic couple that endures exploitative indignities, overcoming the odds stacked against them in order to “stay together” in an unjust and unequal world. It celebrates the parents who suffer dispossession, denigration, and deprivation but take solace in the fact that they are “doing it for the kids,’’ that their hard work will give their kids a shot at making the cut and joining the “talented tenth” that is spared the indignities of dispossession, denigration, and deprivation. It celebrates the nurses and social workers who care for the most abject victims of colonization and slavery, helping unfortunates back on their feet and holding their hands so that the injustices and inequities that continue to batter them do not knock them flat on their backs again. These and other similarly tragic figures are often sainted as “redeemers” by the Hollywood Imagination, which aims to convince us that the root of our suffering is not our captivity but our being unloved and uncared for in our captivity and as captives.
In the real world, captive love and captive maternity are misfortunes that we are compelled to give and receive from one another. Giving and receiving them requires that we repress our awareness of disturbing realities, covering up the facts of racial capitalist genocides, ethnocides, and ecocides with so many wishful and defensive fantasies. Our repressed awareness of these disturbing realities inevitably stirs up feelings of frustration and resentment in us, and captive love and captive maternity quickly turn into hate and cruelty, often directed at “others” whom we make scapegoats for the frustrations and resentments engendered by captive love and captive maternity.
Healthy forms of love and care cannot exist under captivity; they can only emerge in and through the process of refusing, resisting, and escaping captivity in pursuit of autonomy.
Revolutionary lovers and maternals are those who refuse to acquiesce to captivity and, instead, love and nurture their kin in ways that undermine the forces and power formations that make people into chattel slaves, wage slaves, and colonized subjects.
Only those who give and receive revolutionary love and care are able to self-actualize in healthy, tonic ways by refusing, resisting, and escaping the indignities of dispossession, denigration, and deprivation. Otherwise, without giving and receiving revolutionary love and care, one’s own self-actualization will be toxic, as it can only be achieved at the expense of a captive lover or captive maternal.
The Hollywood Imagination often presents us with a false dichotomy: either assume the role of captive lover and captive maternal, or abandon your kin in order to “join the revolution,” “find your higher calling,” etc. The Hollywood Imagination cannot properly recognize that the revolutionary does not self-actualize by abandoning their kin but, rather, loves and cares for their kin by enabling their kin to gather the community, the intellectual and material resources, and the spirit required to refuse, resist, and escape captivity in pursuit of autonomy. It is the revolutionary who is abandoned by their kin when their kin only seek to give and receive captive love and care and reject the giving and receiving of revolutionary love and care.
The Therapeutic Imagination counters the false dichotomies and the wishful and defensive fantasies that are typical of the Hollywood Imagination. The Therapeutic Imagination refuses to romanticize captive love and captive maternity and, instead, exposes how oppressors exploit captive love and captive maternity in order to reproduce victims of oppression. What’s more, going further, the Therapeutic Imagination helps us make sense of what it takes to be a revolutionary lover and caregiver. It teaches us to dispense with the notion that love enables us to overcome adversity and “make it” in a toxic world, and they teach us to embrace the notion that love is the labor of helping each other to refuse, resist, and escape a toxic world and contribute to the (re-)creation of a tonic world.
We are accomplices of slave masters, capitalists, and colonizers and enablers of the fetishes of Empire insofar as we embrace the role of captive lover and captive maternal and succumb to the wishful and defensive fantasies pushed by the Hollywood Imagination, insofar as we convince ourselves that we can “make it” in a toxic world and leave the hard work of (re-)creating a tonic world to others.
Why do we remain so deeply attached to forms of love that are premised on racial, colonial, and ecological violence, and that presume and project the prevalence of so much violence out into the future? What personal and ancestral traumas bind us to the forces of Empire? Are we conditioned to fear being abandoned by those who will only ever accept us as captive lovers and maternals? Or, to be more precise, is it that we are too afraid to admit to ourselves that, by giving and receiving of captive love and captive maternity, we have already been abandoned, both by our loved ones and ourselves?
We desert the forces of Empire and defect to the forces of Nature when we challenge ourselves to give and receive revolutionary love and, in the same gesture, challenge our loved ones to receive and give revolutionary love in return. In so doing, we also confront our fear of being abandoned and the processes of traumatization that have instilled this fear in us. But in challenging ourselves and our loved ones to give and receive revolutionary love, we do not risk abandonment, but recognize abandonment for what it is and, what’s more, free ourselves to divest our time and energy from relations predicated upon our abandonment and to invest in mutual relations of revolutionary love with those who desire.
No one can refuse, resist, and escape today’s toxic world and (re-)create a tonic world for themselves alone, without giving and receiving revolutionary love. The extension of revolutionary love to others, human and non-human, living and dead, has been and will continue to be both the beginning and the end of all truly radical peoples movements. These movements are not defined by the powers and privileges that they seize from the ruling classes and for themselves but, rather, by everyday acts of revolutionary love that condition and enable people to exercise their fundamental freedoms — to flee, to rebel, to (de-/re-)construct worlds — without fear of abandonment and punishment.
