Anti - Valentines day

by iosaf Wed Feb 14, 2007 19:44

(1) means you pretend it's not happening.

(2) means you book tables in as many expensive restaurants as you can & then don't turn up.

(3) you think a little bit about what love means, & what love means to your political or philosophical outlook. I'll share some thoughts with you. The dominant religious attitudes to love in the Christian tradition aren't that interesting - a hodge podge of Aristotlean sexism, and Pauline homophobia. In 2000 years up to Ratzlinger's first encyclical on the meaning of love / lurve there has been little progress. Likewise the tradition of Judaism has not moved much on from the work of Rambam the sephardic rabbi who instructed couples to only shag for babies with the lights out. Islamic thought much influenced by Aristotle which allowed their science to glow in our dark ages could not get past the sexism and as we know hid its minority sexualities in the baths.

I'm not going to tell you about religion or prompt you to think about religion today. Instead I want people to reflect on the loss of love as a central part of life from the Enlightenment & French revolution (whence our rights are derived) onwards. During the 19th century the first anarchist writers included reflections of and calls to the power of love in all its forms - erotic, charitable, fraternal. Bakhunin wrote "Absolute freedom and absolute love - that is our aim; the freeing of humanity and the whole world - that is our purpose" whilst in Tolstoy's epic "War & Peace" which accurately reflected the post-Napoleonic world with more than 500 characters saw him attempt to move fraternal love from the shadows of secretive brotherhoods & charitable love from the begrudgery of the kulak class, whilst his dedication to erotic pursuits needed no comment.
Then we have Marx &Engels. This is when love stops. In the complete written works of the marxist traditions, through Lenin then Stalin to Mao Tse Tung - human love is not discussed once. At the birth of Leninism, Emma Goldman still in the USA had begun to explore the importance of love in inter-gender relations and the question of prostitution. She like Tolstoy adopted a "free love" position writing :- "Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere."
Even if Goldman had not with her contigent of anarchists and early anarcho-feminists been expelled from the USA, her ideas would have found fertile ground in Europe. In the first years of the 20th century the mason & libertarian Ferrer i Gaurdia had not only started the first free school, and facilitated the first anarchist working mens' association thus laying the groud for the CNT - but wrote extensively on the place of love. When Goldman abandoned the Russian revolution, society there ought be familiar to most as "Dr Zhivago". A novel which was censored by the Soviet authorities for its dangerously bourgois invocation of sentimental love. We need only consider the young red army officer whose past love must be forgotten, in his words "the revolution is my only love". Goldman arrived in Barcelona - where the anarchofeminist Federica Montseny had already begun campaiging for family planning & providing support to prostitution. Exactly 71 years ago she and other women started the first anarcho-feminists conference whose second meeting ended amidst the civil war in Spain 70 years ago. By then the Soviet system filled with young "molotov's" had no place in its hearrt for any other love than that of its leader. Who after death would set a horribly familiar pattern - "the man" made God made Satan made Emperor. (I'd briefly ask you to consider the paradigm of the other "revolutionary man made God etc." - Napoleon who we may expect would if alive today say "not tonight Josephine". THe message was clear - contrary to Kissenger's quip "power is an aphrodisiac" at the height of his TV popularity (which might surprise many to think he had) - "Power" was & has been anything but. Goldman knew the power shared by both Napoleon and Kissenger was that of capital. That same power which books the expensive table for 2 at restaurants tonight & pushes the cocoa producers of South America with the scourge and whip of Western capitalism.
Stalin following Lenin not only eschewed any mention of love which by then had been censored from every opera & book - but oversaw the subversion of maternal love. The children of the "motherland" were thence on to be borne by women for the state. The entry of women into positions of pseudo-equality in the Soviet state - cosmonauts, soldiers, doctors - was always at the price of sacrifice to the "hatcheries" of the state. Where children were breastfed and cuddled only at appointed times.
It is no co-inicidence that Orwell in writing 1984 chose as his crux flaw of the marxist conditioning of life a sexual relationship - termed "sex-crime". Winston Smith's relationship with Julia convicts him to the gulag of 2 plus 2 equals 5 when and only when it turns sentimental. Simarly Huxley in his reflection of the "hatcheries" of Moscow would drive home the point. In Europe outside of the Soviet block the first school marxists would move in a holistic analysis to take on all the baggage of Freud who had dismissed the phenomona of being in love as a mere passing and momentary psychosis. Moving to times more familiar to today's generation - in the 1960's by the advent of the second school marxists and the beginning of modern youth culture - the students of Paris took to the barricades and as we learnt this week others more radical in Germany took to arms. But the paradigm held - marxist revolutionaries had no place in their lives for love. Only the leaders were beloved. The single most public couple produced in over a hundred years of marxist thought were the philosopher Sarte and Simone du Bouvoir. One wrestling with his belief in the imperitive he felt for ethical behaviour yet the philosophy he thought of existentialism - the other a committed nymphomaniac and possibly the first non-anarchist feminist since Woolstencroft. I need only remind the reader - not only did Sartre and Simone not have sex - they made a fetishised perverted voyeuristic act of it. They let everyone know they didn't have sex.

Aristotlean sexism and Pauline homophobia had thus been allowed through the back door into marxist realities. If religion had been the opium of the people then love & sex were its cocaine. It is no surprise that the soviet states and the soviet empire inculcated an institutionalised homophobia which is extant to this day. Why else are the lesbian and gay groups of Moscow prohibited from public display? Fortuantely for you kids and those of us who did our best shagging a while back - the respect and centrality of love and its sexual expression & its unbreakable connections to fraternal & charitable love survived. In the most recent times the phenomona of TAZ, free parties and rave would again bring such love to its proper place. It may be reflected that the alternative benefits of fertility control which would have brought this generation a Mao-ist centrally controlled population of workers did not transpire.

It is my thesis and opinion that "Love" was & is the weakest point of the Marxist system. Especially considering that the other pillar of its social theory Freudianism has now been properly rejected.
I ask you to consider today & tomorrow when capitalism will no longer market Love- What went wrong? How did the cocaine of the masses - become chocolate covered capitalism?
Remember to the religious who are still with us Goldman proposed undermining the family as the core unit of society, still their main worry. For the communists we have to leave behind the material utopia could only be assured by obeying the plan & will of the leader as the religious pursued a relationship with an un-answering God. At end it is my contention that the true failure of communist belief systems has been and will be their relationship to the place of "love" in the human condition. Just as I consider the murderously jealous & envious love which underpins the nationalist pursuit of "patria" as the true failure of that "-ism".

ipse dixet -
.:. Anarchism means Love.
© copyright iosaf mac diarmada english summary translation of text published in catalan 14 ii 2007

Sartre & du Bouvoir 1970 the greatest couple in marxism. never had sex.

from Bakhunin to Goldman to Bey to now - anarchism is love.

by V Sat Feb 10, 2007 12:52

Wasn't Valentine martyred (murdered by the imperial state) for conducting illegal weddings at a time of conscription and war?...........you know war? Like this one that refuels and passes through your country daily! That Amerikkka has taken another dissident memory and commercialised it, is hardly surprising. Your response is bewildering in the midst of the Baghdad surge and on the eve of the bombing of Iran! Partyon, dis a dissiden't memory as the bombs fall somewhere else.

Do a little research before picking your targets next time.

by Bitter Thu Feb 08, 2007 12:52

Dear Honest Hypcrite,
Honesty does not excuse your shallow duplicity. Some of us have a genuine grievance against that giant wrecking ball called love. Others have an ideologically immaculate objection to the capitalists' exploitation of Valentine's Day. This is to be OUR night.
I think I know who you are and if I find you behind a mask on Saturday I'm going to expose you and I'm going to pour a vial of Cupid's blood all over your fancy shirt.
Yours aggrievedly,
Bitter

by Honest hypocrite Thu Feb 08, 2007 12:25

Dr nick, what you may not have considered is that many people proclaim to hate Valentine's Day for lots of valid reasons, but also have a lover/partner and do something nice with him/her on Feb 14th. I am one of those people.
The choice of date (no pun intended) for this event means that us hypocrites have four days to shift our sentiment from anti-romantic cynicism to romantic devotion and take our loved one out to dinner.

by Dr nick Wed Feb 07, 2007 16:14

Good idea.Ive always hated valentines day.Money making racket that it its.
You should have it on Valentines night,then I might actually go

by Gaelish - Seomra Spraoi Tue Feb 06, 2007 22:58

Here's a translation of the above comment:

TITLE:
Love or gloom

COMMENT:
Speaking for myself, i've nothing against love!

by Duine Mon Feb 05, 2007 15:58

I mo leith fhéin, níl rud agam i gcoinne grá!

by krossie - wsm bitter faction Mon Feb 05, 2007 15:16

I salute its bitterness and toast it in blood!

krossie

by Lusty Waillish - Seomra Spraoi Mon Feb 05, 2007 11:41

Several bitter, heartbroken, romance-hating punters, while welcoming an Anti-Valentine's event, have complained that the flyer does not have enough blood, misery, horror etc. So here is a new flyer with more blood. (By the way, in case you were too busy to notice, the headline says Hellmark, not Hallmark.
Death to Hallmark!

Cupid still bleeding to death on the Hellmark crown

by seven hills Fri Feb 02, 2007 18:22

Some people say the feast was celebrated on Valentine's Day- but I think
it was the 15th of Feburary, anyway, the roman god of fertility and all that
whips and things....

semi- naked people used whips to get the old blood boiling up for the
annual festival- its better than the martyrdom complex.

go on wiki it. The Feast of Lupercal- but strictly no sex for twelve months after.

by Waillish Lust Fri Feb 02, 2007 16:38

OK, it's a JPEG this time.

by Waillish - Seomra Spraoi Fri Feb 02, 2007 16:31

This flyer is a quarter of A4, so if ya had a colour printer and wanted to print a few, just stick four together etc etc.

antivalentine2007flyer.pdf 0.32 Mb