AGAINST THE LOGIC OF SUBMISSION:
FREE LOVE
Because revolutionary anarchists of all types have
recognized the freedom of every individual to
determine how they will live on their own terms to
be a central aim of anti-authoritarian revolution, we
have spoken more often and with more courage of
the transformation of personal life that must be
part of any real revolution. Thus, questions of love
and erotic desire have been openly discussed in
anarchist circles from very early on. Anarchists
were among the first advocates of free love
recognizing in marriage and the absurd sexual
restrictions imposed by religious morality ways in
which submission to authority was imposed. Women
such as Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Clayre
recognized in puritanical morality one of the
greatest enemies to the liberation of women in
particular as well as humanity in general.
But the free love advocated by anarchists should
not be confused with the tawdry hedonism
advocated by Playboy and other promoters of
commodified sexual liberation. This latter is merely
a reaction to Puritanism from within the present
social context. Its continued adherence to the logic
of submission is evident in its commodification and
objectification of sex, its dismissive attitude toward
passionate love-because it can't be quantified and
priced-and its tendency to judge people based on
sexual willingness, performance and conquest. Love
and erotic desire freed from the logic of submission
clearly lies elsewhere.
The struggle against the logic of submission begins
with the struggle of individuals to create the lives
and relations they desire. In this context, free love
means precisely the freedom of each individual's
erotic desires from the social and moral restrictions
that channel them into a few specific forms useful
to society so that each may create the way she
loves as he sees fit in relation to those she may
love. Such a liberation opens the way for an
apparently infinite variety of possible loving and
erotic relations. Most people would only want to
explore a few of these, but the point of such
liberation is not that one must explore as many
forms of erotic desire as possible, but that one has
the possibility to really choose and create ways of
loving that bring him joy, that expand her life and
goad him to an ever increasing intensity of living and
of revolt.
One of the most significant obstacles presently
facing us in this area is pity for weakness and
neurosis. There are individuals who know clearly
what they desire in each potential loving encounter,
people who can act and respond with a projectual
clarity that only those who have made their
passions and desires their own can have. But when
these individuals act on their desires, if another
who is less sure of themselves is unnerved or has
their feelings hurt, they are expected to change
their behavior to accommodate the weakness of this
other person. Thus the strong-willed individual who
has grasped the substance of free love and begun
to live it often finds herself suppressed or
ostracized by his own supposed comrades. If our
aims are indeed liberation and the destruction of
the logic of submission in all areas of life , then we
cannot give in to this. The point is to transform
ourselves into strong, daring, self-willed, passionate
rebels-and, thus, also into strong, daring,
self-willed, passionate lovers-and this requires
acting without guilt, regret or pity. This
self-transformation is an essential aspect of the
revolutionary transformation of the world , and we
cannot let it get side-tracked by a pity that
degrades both the one who pities and the one who
is pitied. Compassion-that feeling with another
because one recognizes one's own condition in
theirs-can be a beautiful and revolutionary feeling,
but pity-which looks down at another's misery and
offers charity and self-sacrifice, is worthless for
creating a world of strong individuals who can live
and love as they choose.
But an even greater impediment to a real practise
of free love and the open exploration the varieties
of possible relationships is that most people (even
most anarchists) have so little greed for, and
therefore so little generosity with, passion,
intensity of feeling, love, joy, hatred, anguish-all
the flaming pangs of real living. To truly allow the
expansiveness of passionate intensity to flower and
to pursue it where the twisting vine of desire takes
it-this exploration requires will, strength and
courage...but mainly it requires breaking out of the
economic view of passions and emotions. It is only in
the realm of economy-of goods for sale-that greed
and generosity contradict each other. In the realm
of uncommodified feelings, passions, desires, ideas,
thoughts and dreams, greed and generosity go
hand-in-hand. The more one wants of these things,
the more expansive one must be in sharing them.
The more generous one is with them, the more one
will have. It is the nature of these things to be
expansive, to seek to broaden all horizons, to take
more and more of reality into themselves and
transform it.
But this expansiveness is not indiscriminate. Love
and erotic desire can manifest expansively in many
different ways, and individuals choose the ways and
the individuals with whom they wish to explore
them. It makes no sense, however, to make these
decisions based on an imagined dearth of something
that is, in fact, potentially beyond measure. Rather
such decisions are best based on desire for those
to whom one chooses to relate and the potential one
perceives in them to make the fires of passion burn
ever more brightly.
The mechanics of erotic desire-homosexuality,
heterosexuality, bisexuality, monogamy,
non-monogamy, etc.-are not the substance of free
love. It can manifest in all of these forms and
more. Its substance is found in those who choose to
expand themselves, to goad themselves to expand
their passions, dreams desires and thoughts. Free
love, like revolution, acts to recreate reality in its
own image, the image of a great and dangerous
utopia. Thus it seeks to turn reality on its head.
This is no easy path. It has no place for our
weaknesses, no time for neurotic self-pity or
meagerness. For love in its most impassioned and
unconstrained forms is as cruel as revolution. How
could it be otherwise when its goal is the same: the
transformation of every aspect of life and the
destruction of all that prevents it?