Modern Productive Powers and Love
– N. Ribar –
The fundamental characteristic of today’s era is the contradiction between the gigantic accumulation of human productive powers which are social, and the appropriation of surplus value which is private. Society has long moved past the necessity for private relations, and today as the human productive powers continue to grow, the private interests are doing whatever they can to destroy them, and if they cannot do that, warp them to such a great degree where they have the mark of nothing modern. In that sense, it is correct but not the entire truth to say that the bourgeoisie is holding back society — in fact, they are actively smashing it in a desperate attempt to keep the new society, with its aims to resolve the contradiction of the era, under wraps. It is only natural that this results in a degeneration in the extreme — ideas go back to medievalism and life becomes reduced to the most minimal sensory pleasures where many wonder what the point of living is at all. Culture, indeed, is a key sphere in the battle raging between the old and the new.
Recently, the former chief business officer of Google, Mo Gawdat, claimed on a podcast that love and relationships will be transformed to a significant degree with the invention and advanced stage of AI. He asserted that some sort of robotic body with an AI chip will be and is, in some way, already a means of sexual stimulation. In the present, he said that one only needs to strap on an AI headset to see what is possible. In the future, he posited that inventions such as Neuralink will control people’s neural impulses to simulate sexual sensations.
The basic outlook here is that love is a thing. Gawdat states that love, in fact, is only a sensation or an amalgamation of sensations, that it is “all signals in your brain.” Later on, he adds that dating apps will soon begin offering virtual characters for users to date, claiming that to the human brain there is no difference between what resembles the thing and what is the thing. He finally finishes his diatribe by stating that he is not clear on whether this is a positive or negative development for humanity. One thing is for sure, these statements reek of a guilty conscience.
We deny that love is a thing. It is a relation, between individuals and individuals, individuals and collectives, and collectives and collectives. Love is a social phenomenon. One can say one of the following, which are all relates: you love, I love, he loves, she loves, we love. This love cannot be without an aim, it is pointed at someone individually or as a collective. So, for example, a human can love another human, or a people may love another people, or a human may love a people. This love is not the same as when when one makes an off-handed comment about “loving” things, like consumer goods. If we are to exclude animals, other living beings, from the pronoun “it,” there is and can be no such thing as “it loves.” What is called love in this direction is hyperbole, or else it is indicative of serious mental delusion.
One simply cannot love without the other to love them in return. The feeling of love itself is conditioned by this return and is an integral part of its development. Aside from what is accidental, anomalous, one can only love another as long as the hope for their love in return is still there. As long as the condition of reciprocal love is absent, one’s love for them can only develop until a certain point, where the individual loses all hope and love turns into sadness and grief. These facts are not simply limited to the pursuit of romantic partners, as love has often been reduced to in today’s society, but extend also to the pursuit of friendships.
To continue to love without reciprocation is typical of decaying bourgeois society, where all that is filthy and base is glorified and raised to the highest peaks. Prostitution, what is most degrading and demeaning to women, is growing at record numbers, with some teenage girls aspiring to make accounts on social media platforms for buying and selling naked pictures once they turn of legal age. Never before has human society seen phenomena like this, and this is logical because human society has never been so decadent as today. Why do I mention this? Because prostitution works in similar ways to the use of AI for sexual and romantic purposes — buying and selling a replica of the “real thing” to feel some sort of chemical stimulation.
The absence of a social love, where people care for one another by dint of being human, instils desperation in the individual. The aforementioned anomalies today where one loves without reciprocation are due to the rabid condition of an individual who lives with an absence of love to an extreme degree. Conditions develop whereby one thinks in a paranoid manner, and not of the relations and the state that serves them, but of one’s fellow man. He becomes focussed on one thing or person, and goes into a craze. Bourgeois social “science” will say that the person simply needed medication all along, that they were born “nuts,” and that their instability is their own fault, as part and parcel of the metaphysical outlook that opposes the view of phenomena as interconnecting and interpenetrating. Surely, one’s outcome had nothing to do with their conditions, with the conditions which the society gives them.
Nobody who has love, both individual and social, can fall into such a pit (at least, caused by love). And, moreover, what one may call “substitutions for love” such as prostitution and AI, only seem to expedite this fall. This confirms the thesis that love is not a thing, because if it were, these substitutions would be perfectly adequate to satisfy human needs. They are not because love is a relation, most often between humans and humans, and one’s fulfilment can only come from the recognition of the necessity for this relation in the individual.
As mentioned, it is said that such implants as those created by Elon Musk’s Neuralink project will be able to stimulate the impulses in one’s brain to create a feeling of love. This is truly the most anti-human of all. It attempts to twist the relation of love, human bonds cultivated over millennia, human activity itself, into a sensation at the mere click of a button. What was formerly based on a necessary bond between individuals, is turned into the shallow confines of one individual and their sensations. It is the most extreme form of reaction meant to deprive people of an outlook that favours their interests. Without identifying the needs of society and giving oneself an outlook that will allow the people to meet those needs, the individual’s thinking will remain burdened with the old prejudices and its trademarked incoherent thinking. How can one limit oneself to sensory pleasures caused by an implant and think in line with the needs of society? It is simply impossible, and that is certainly the goal. The invention of such devices is a grave abuse of the advanced human productive powers, directing them towards an attempt to overpower the people and make them docile, subservient and satisfied with their lot.
All the talk from the so-called “left,” “right” and “centre” about love today contains one kernel feature — the reduction of love to hedonism and pleasure-seeking.
It is not uncommon for sickly self-satisifed “leftists” to say that new inventions to simulate “love” (by which they mean hedonism) are “good” in order to aid those who cannot obtain love. This is promoted under the signboard of equality for all, satisfying the “needs” of those who cannot be satisfied. These individuals, often termed “anti-social,” are not thought of as a product of their conditions within a definite historical period. This historical period is one where, in all spheres of life, what is anti-social is being held up as a good example to follow. They are thought of to possess, like the story of the man who “goes crazy” and is given every medication to sedate him, the underlying conditions for such an event from the day of their birth, even from the whom. And all this is not ultra-reactionary, as we know it is in fact, but “progressive.”
From what is called the “right,” the opposition to these phenomena may appear to be much greater. However, this can only be said in words. In essence, they are for the same narrow and reactionary outlook that defines love within the boundaries of the individual. In many ways, they are more for its further deepening than the “left” is. One can take the abundance of “self-help” books and other media that is churned out and consumed by these forces. The problem is the individual, is your mentality, so “toughen up,” harden your heart and defend your narrow circle to your death. Such a stance is akin to the tribalism of old, which is resurgent along with medieval thinking. In this vein, they like to talk about the defence of the “nuclear family” against its destruction and so on. When discussing love, they merely say what is degenerate is the fact that hedonism is done in public. However, if hedonism is done in private and, moreover, if it is in opposition to the public world, then that is perfectly fine.
The qualitative difference between the new outlook and these two outlooks, which are in fact the same outlook with different quantities, is that the new defends the full flourishing of love into a new love which puts the individual and collective on par. One’s love for an individual is also their love for the collective, one’s love for the collective is also its love for the individual, and so on. Old, individual love is transcended by social love, a new, higher form of love. Love is finally recognized not as a thing but as a relation. I have written about and elaborated this elsewhere so it is not necessary to do so here.
One thing which comes to mind, however, is why the bourgeoisie is so afraid of this type of love. Who, in their right mind, could be against something which benefits and serves all? The truth is that irrationalism and pragmatism defines the psychology of the monopoly bourgeois. From their vantage point, such a development would be very dangerous to their rule. If the people took up the slogan Our Security Lies in our Fight for the Rights of All, for example, man would no longer feel compelled to compete with his fellow man for an ever decreasing slice of the pie. Instead, he would feel a sense of commonality and unity in interests and fight for a common aim, with a common immediate program and long-term strategy. Part of this unity, the flourishing of the new, social love, would be opposing technologies intended to smash this love.
There are many examples in history of forces which have been demeaned as wreckers of development who were fighting for a just cause. The Luddites are demeaned most of all with the allegation that they went around smashing machines like lunatics who hated progress. In fact, there is something in their past which is most admirable. Perhaps they did not not have a coherent outlook, but how could they? Capitalism was emerging at a rapid pace and its fundamental laws were not to be analysed until Marx. What they did do was fight for their basic interests by destroying that which was being used to ensnare them into wage-slavery. No doubt, the Marxist-Leninists, who do have a coherent and consistent ideology and outlook, and can analyse present-day bourgeois society on the basis of its laws, will be seen as modern Luddites for denouncing the development of technology that is anti-people. Let it be so. We know who is actually wrecking production and who is for its further development in line with the interests of the proletariat. Once the old relations of individual appropriation of profit are transformed into new relations of the maximum satisfaction of the material life of the working people, the productive forces will be liberated and developments never before imagined will become a reality.`
As for the efforts to confine love within the individual, what do they have to show for themselves so far? The working people today are certainly not satisfied with their lot, despite the level of productive forces. The bourgeoisie is a dying, moribund class, a cipher and parasite on the creative activity of man. The people are seeing through all these manoeuvres to a greater extent each day, recognizing what the bourgeoisie has in store for them and the objective necessity to oppose it. In specific, while what is called the “mainstream media” rejoices over new technologies such as AI and brain implants and their impact, the people remain concerned.