Notes on romantic love in capitalist culture: love as ownership

Notes on romantic love in capitalist culture: love as ownership

Historically, as a universal and eternal sensation, we presumed the concept of love and romantic love. However, there is a concrete origin and formulation of what we understand as romantic love, far from being something historical.

Love is a hard problem to define. Some many texts and journals abstractly approach this field. Theorizing about it, however, involves delving into the mental or emotional plane's connection with the entire social system. Or put another way: to understand that the characteristics and expression of love in the concrete take on meaning within historical contexts and particular social orders, far from being something individual, even if they incorporate subjective elements.

Love is not universal or ahistorical. Love is socially described by values that are connected in all its historical forms to organizations such as marriage or family and within the context of distinct manufacturing methods. We do not plan to cover all the aspects of this issue in this paper, but rather to create a first approach to the point of love concerning society.

Love story (s)

"Humanity has undertaken the job of controlling not only intersex interactions from its initial phases of social life but also love itself. In clan culture, morality built the love determined by blood ties as the ultimate virtue. When the tribal principle prevailed, and the first embryos of the political structure were formed, the loving form of friendship between two members of the same tribe enjoyed the highest esteem. "(Proletarian love ideology, 1923). Alexandra Kollontai starts with these phrases to detail the distinct types of love that have predominated in different cultures.

We see how love was configured concerning the interests of the various organizations that control social relationships in each level of culture. Love strengthened the bond of kinship in the clan community, which was structured by blood ties. The significant thing at the moment of the tribal concept was to generate spiritual and moral connections that firmly united their members beyond kinship with the tribe or community. Love-friendship was, therefore, a great virtue. The offspring were regarded as the highest virtue in the feudal era, which was purely due to the interests of the noble family, concerning their elders.

The research by Kollontai is comprehensive and based on many examples of mythology and literature. The absence of other research in this region, however, makes deepening it very hard. In addition to the precise profiling of the lines on which the distinct concepts of love were endorsed in each community, the idea that Kollontai is trying to express is the same with which the quotation starts: "From its initial social phases.

Marriage, love, and sexuality

We can say at this stage that intimacy, romance, and sexuality are not always related elements. When these three components are firmly connected, it will be under capitalism and bourgeois domination.

Marriage and sexuality started with the advent of patriarchy decades ago. The patriarchy-established dominance over women's body and sexuality produced gender inequality. “To ensure the fidelity of the woman and, consequently, the paternity of the children, she is handed over without reservation to the power of the man.” Engels expressed in The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State. It will be later, though, when love joins this equation as we know it in modern society.

The time when the bourgeoisie acquires political power and starts to expand the values of an individual-based culture is when something is deepened that has already occurred since the family emerged in society but is now highly accentuated. Plus. Something that Engels already expresses in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: "The family, focused on the married pair, is a room complete of emotions when the ancient community ties are broken. The passion of love as the core of the reproduction of the social system, for which certain domestication of sexuality was also essential."

The modern family takes on a significant position in society under capitalism. A portion of the essential reproduction for capitalism is practiced in the family and the political environment: the breeding and "tune-up" of the workers. This institution is reinforced by concrete and material processes such as the whole legal system (wedding contract, property and inheritance legislation), salary inequality or the burden of care that falls on females, making the family a unit "needed" for survival, but is also reinforced by subjective or emotional processes such as love.

Marriage, the regulation of the family, is based on two fundamental values to enhance the family as an organization: indissolubility and the concept of property over the other. We see that these values are praised as maximum by the ideals of romantic love and relate to achievement and happiness. Even in societies where there is more settlement of components of sexual freedom or divorce, the latter is seen as a failure and the former as a phase of life usually connected with youth. Society shows that we are all looking for our great love, that or that life partner, beyond the youth phase, deep down. A principle that denies each individual's concept of evolution, change, and psychological development throughout his or her existence.

The idea of ownership, for its part, is created through the notion of fidelity which is nothing more than the practice of purchase about sexuality and the body, but not only about the other's emotions and psychology. The concept of the emotional property also expands, invading free union, beyond legal marriage. In the broadest sense, this is genuinely monogamy.

Since the roots of this organization, monogamy has been connected with marriage and family. The family arises with an apparent social function: "Monogamy was born out of the concentration of excellent riches in the same hands-those of a person-and out of the willingness that only his kids inherit such wealth." This is how Engels explains the family's social function concerning the appearance of private property and eventually, the connection between the patriarchy and class society.

Thus, monogamy was the way to regulate the sexuality of women, avoiding legacy dispersion. However, other forms of monogamous family throughout the distinct human cultures made no reference to exclusivity or property concerning the mental or social plane, this was a constant in history since the advent of private property. However, something that happens under the domain of bourgeois morality is strongly connected with marriage, gender, and love.

In 1911, Kollontai articulated it as follows: "The Middle Ages knights even came to acknowledge their wives as having platonic worshipers and receiving the testimony of this worship of knights and menials. The idea of complete ownership, of ownership not only of the physical "I," but also of the spiritual "I" by the spouse, of the ideal that acknowledges the claim of property rights over the loved one's mental and emotional universe, is an ideal that has been entirely created and that has also been cultivated by the bourgeoisie to reinforce the foundations of the family,And that was also grown by the bourgeoisie to bolster the family's foundations, to guarantee its stability and strength during the era of battle to conquer its social dominance.

Engels will attempt to clarify the connection between love and the monogamous bourgeois family: "By transforming everything into goods, capitalist manufacturing demolished all the traditional ties of the past and substituted hereditary customs and historical rights with sales with the' free' agreement. Under capitalism, we are moving from a hereditary order of things to a freely agreed one. "And Engels will proceed:' It is necessary to employ individuals who can freely dispose of their individuals, actions, and property and who enjoy the same privileges. Precisely one of the primary duties of capitalist manufacturing was to create these' free' and' equal' individuals."Thus the marriage contract was officially voluntary in the new capitalist society, it should begin with the parties ' liberty of decision, and that will was expressed in reciprocal love. For Engels, "marriage for love has been proclaimed as a human right." It is not uncommon that at the time of the marriage formalization, the verbalization of the interested parties' will acquire great prominence through the "yes I want," and the seal of the contract is a kiss.

There is also another concept in the family equation that makes the component of love tremendously accessory. A fresh idea that Engels has created. It follows from his quotation(*) that romantic love under capitalism gains so much strength and expands to all social classes as a whole. It is also assumed by the proletariat as a whole, prepared by the bourgeois ideology to preserve its privileges, exalted by the doctrine imparted by the State, the Church and the media. The ruling class ' thoughts become the dominant ideas in a community, and the traditional forms of love are not alien to this equation.

There is the other aspect: the absence of security in modern culture suffered by most individuals, their isolation and confrontation with the surroundings. If we see how the destitute individual, the one who is part of the working class and the poorest sectors of society, faces the world, we will see their search for connections with others as "natural." The quest for love and shelter in the family becomes a question of survival in the face of the voracity of capitalism. But the bourgeois principles of ownership and indissolubility invade and disturb that "natural" desire for emotional bonding.