revolutionary mothering love on the front lines

But it cannot be claimed that merely calling yourself a “relationship anarchist” (or a “relationship communist,” or even a “communist,” for that matter) has political potential in itself. One of the important merits of RA as a discursive paradigm is its fashioning a critical language to dissect and communicate needs, power dynamics, boundaries, consensual structures, and individual dignity and worth. Language is one sphere in which material struggle plays out, but struggle does not reduce to language or changes in language. In general, terminology and language alone will not save or liberate. As communists, we want better intuitions about how the world works, so that the path to transforming the world becomes clarified. Relationship anarchists share values with communist goals and communists in general these values need to be assessed and politicized. Fundamentally, I want to say that RA has severely overestimated its “subversive” or “radical” potential while failing to critically assess its own political intuitions about the world and apply those conclusions to its own self-reflective practices. This document is an attempt at an immanent critique of RA principles as revolutionary principles. These are thoughts from a former “Relationship Anarchist” (and political anarchist) towards a conversation concerning a communist retrospective: here’s what I learned, here’s what I think needs to be improved. What would it mean to bring a communist political perspective to bear on paradigms like Relationship Anarchy, polyamory, and other practices of non-monogamy that claim to critique or “subvert” hegemonic power relations as they play out in interpersonal relationships? As such, our conceptualization and experience of relationships with each other are valid objects of communist political critique, ones that ought to be acted on, clarified, critically assessed, and mobilized as a resource for material practice. Communism is a (never quite) total transformation of our relationship to our means of producing the world, our labor the contribution of Marxist Feminisms, among other things, has been to demonstrate how our relationships with each other are a part of our means of producing the world.

Revolutionary mothering love on the front lines