Why not simply say that human relationships are bound by love. After all,
contracts are always conditional, whereas love is not.
Let's have a think. This idea would possibly help to explain why many people
disparage free love so much, as a dreamy hippy phenomenon, applying only
to marginalised people, who just weren't brought up sexually in a correct
way, and suffered from a post-war Dr Spock syndrome. But this liberal notion
of course abstracts from the social relation within which that development
occurs, concentrating on the isolated, possessive individual.
If love is free, you cannot make money out of it, or obtain money from it;
in addition, free love might indeed subvert moral-emotional principles,
which depend on ideas of ownership, exclusivity and reciprocal obligation
which are indispensable for:
(1) private property boundaries (owning),
(2) market transactions (distributing, through ownership transfer in
exchanges)
(3) capital accumulation (appropriation based on appropriation, i.e.
cumulative appropriation) and
(4) consumption (appropriation conditional on exchange).
Certainly, love would seem to be best characterised as a life process, or
practice, involving the interactions and relationships of giving, receiving,
obtaining and taking, in which emotions, awareness and morality are
necessarily implicated.
This definition (often reflected in pop music, as young people try to work
out what these relations are, how they really operate, and how you cope with
them) would explain why love is so difficult to define, even if we can
recognise, experience or feel love (incidentally, the indefatigable Marxist
Ernest Mandel dedicated one of his books to his deceased wife, the
journalist Gisela Scholtz (alias Martine Knoeller), for whom he said
generosity was like breathing).
It also means you could give too much or too little, take too much or to
little, receive too much or too little, and so on. In fact, the equilibium
equation for love might be difficult to reach, if indeed it could exist at
all, rather than be a hypothetical state, or hypostasis.
If love is unconditional or has no conditions, this implies (at least in
some christian-type or Islamic-type cultures) an act of giving without any
(immediate) reciprocation or expectation of reward.
But if love is interpreted as a relation, process or practice, rather than
simply a state of being or awareness, love may not be unconditional,
because such an act of giving presupposes the non-existence of a scarcity,
which would permit the giving to occur.
Yet, there may be scarcity, and it might be not just a subjectively
perceived, marginal utility-type scarcity or an anal-retentive type of
scarcity perception, but an objective, materially imposed scarcity.
Fact is, you cannot give something, if you don't have something to give, in
the first instance. Conversely, the more you have, the more you are in a
position to give.
Hence, there may be an objective material basis for love; that is to say, to
distribute love, it has to be created, and so long as human beings are not
simply souls, but physical beings, living in a material world, that creation
itself has material prequisites and sublimates.
Furthermore, while unconditionally giving something might not in fact
express love at all (as it might help somebody into hell, as when a mother
smothers an infant), being able to unconditionally give something, might
also mean a dissociation from any feelings involved.
In Paris in 1844, Marx scribbled: Assume people to be human, and their
relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only
for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an
artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other
people, you must be a person with a
stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your
relations to people and to nature must be a specific expression,
corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If
you love without evoking love in return - that is, if your loving as loving
does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself
as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is
impotent - a misfortune. (MECW, Vol.3, p. 326, translation revised).
In what Michael Perelman calls the perverse economy, the possibility for
the permutations of exchange have become seemingly boundless, such that
anything can trade against anything in an unlimited, relativistic
postmodernist culture, which has its consequences for human development,
because the trading process might in fact destroy more love than it creates,
resulting in war.
Specifically, the act of trading itself becomes viewed as a creative
process, and creation becomes viewed as an act of trading, with the
consequence that the production of love can no longer be distinguished
from the appropriation or exchange of love.
In that case, it may no longer be
