Love – there are few things which are as omnipresent as this phenomenon. Love is on the one hand the central heating in our universe, the feeling that gives sense to our life. On the other hand it is the source for jealousy and hate. In the search-engine google are more than eight trillion entries for the word love. In music, literature and movies again and again we are confronted with the success or failure of love – throughout the whole history. There are no real borders for the usage. You can love your fatherland, work, car, god, animals, music, chocolate and even capitalism. Some people fall in love on Friday like The Cure, other people’s business is loving wisdom (philosophers). In western societies it is used in dimensions, as it was never before the case in history. Asking people about the relationship of love and capitalism many requests claim that they have nothing to do with each other or even that they are contradictory. This leads us to an interesting point, because our economic system – capitalism – tries permanently to make use of other spheres and even, according to Polanyi, subordinates them.
This paper aims to analyze the relationship of love and capitalism and to show something similar Marx did with the commodity: that love is influenced by the conditions of society (especially economy) and that its magic is one that is socially constructed. The thesis is, according to Polanyi’s great transformation, that love experienced a great transformation: at least at part was love freed up by capitalism from moral and normative chains, love has become a market and capitalism subordinated love to the economy. The analysis concentrates due to the limited frame on the western culture and on heterosexual love. Furthermore the paper is more descriptive then normative; the aim is not the critic of a specific concept of love but to find out how capitalism and love interact with each other and whether one system is subordinated to the other.
Contents
1 Introduction
2 What is Love?
2.1 The Essence of Love
2.2 The Romantic Utopia
3 Capitalism and Love
3.1 Comparison of Capitalism and the Romantic Utopia
3.2 Consumption of the Romantic Utopia and Romantizisation of Commodities
3.2.1 Romantizisation of Commodities
3.2.2 Consuming the Romantic Utopia
3.3 Love’s Subsumption under Capitalism: The development of Marriage Markets
3.3.1 The transformation in the ecology of choice
3.3.2 The transformation in the architecture of choice
4 Conclusion
Bibliography
1 Introduction
Love – there are few things which are as omnipresent as this phenomenon. Love is on the one hand the central heating in our universe, the feeling that gives sense to our life. On the other hand it is the source for jealousy and hate. In the search-engine google are more than eight trillion entries for the word love. In music, literature and movies again and again we are confronted with the success or failure of love – throughout the whole history. There are no real borders for the usage. You can love your fatherland, work, car, god, animals, music, chocolate and even capitalism. Some people fall in love on Friday like The Cure, other people’s business is loving wisdom (philosophers). In western societies it is used in dimensions, as it was never before the case in history. Asking people about the relationship of love and capitalism many requests claim that they have nothing to do with each other or even that they are contradictory. This leads us to an interesting point, because our economic system – capitalism – tries permanently to make us of other spheres and even, according to Polanyi, subordinates them.
This paper aims to analyze the relationship of love and capitalism and to show something similar Marx did with the commodity: that love is influenced by the conditions of society (especially economy) and that its magic is one that is socially constructed. The thesis is, according to Polanyi’s great transformation, that love experienced a great transformation: at least at part was love freed up by capitalism from moral and normative chains, love has become a market and capitalism subordinated love to the economy. The analysis concentrates due to the limited frame on the western culture and on heterosexual love. Furthermore the paper is more descriptive then normative; the aim is not the critic of a specific concept of love but to find out how capitalism and love interact with each other and whether one system is subordinated to the other.
The paper remains as follows: In the first part love is defined and afterwards that the concept and idea of romantic love is introduced. In the second part the relationship between capitalism and love is at the fore. Firstly capitalism is described in relevant aspects and then compared to the characteristics of romantic love. Secondly one important development which begins in the 20th century is analyzed: the commodification of love and the romanticization of commodities (or: capitalism, in general). Due to the fact that this is not the whole story an introspection of another important development gets explicated: the evolvement of marriage markets and the organization of love under capitalistic structures. In the conclusion worthwhile results are summed up.
2 What is Love?
2.1 The Essence of Love
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”1
(Karl Marx)
In the last decades a lot of research was done to find the essence of what we call love, especially in the field of neurobiology.2 It shows that the first step if we are (not exclusively sexually) attracted to someone is the hormonal release of oxytocin and vasopressin.3 This does not allow us to reduce love to a biochemical process, because first of all we are exposed to an emotion. Attraction must not be equal to love and more importantly, we have to ascribe something to the biochemical process, to the emotion, as an example that we have a crush on someone.4 Emotions come and go; it would be strange to ascribe love just to an emotion which could change every five minutes. Not just humans but also animals have emotions and they were developed along our phylogenesis. We are not able to control them and without them we would be unoriented, they indicate that we are hungry, cold, sexual attracted etc.
Now an important distinction between emotions and feelings comes into play, which goes back to Schachter and his two factor theory of emotion: Feelings arise when emotions evocate ideas or conceptions. This cannot be explained with a reduction to brain processes because even if we visualize the active brain regions in a MRT we cannot say which kind of idea, viz. feeling, a person has.5 To illustrate this let us consider homesickness. To have homesickness you have to know what homesickness is and that the emotion you have is homesickness, otherwise you just feel a diffuse melancholy.
Love is not just an emotion, but a feeling.6 This seems to be the point of La Rochefoucauld who said that “few people would fall in love had they not heard about it”7. We interpret our body’s reactions, from a reflected point of view with some distance.8 Hence we can agree with Sartre, who said that the Ego is not the owner of our consciousness, but its object which led him to the conclusion that humans are inventing their selves continuously.9
Precht (2010) claims that “Love” implies additionally after the initial emotion and the building of complex feelings a third component: behavior. To love someone means reflected behavior, that we put us into someone’s position to understand the person’s wishes and needs in order to adjust our behavior to the person.10
What follows from that? The essence of love is something natural, a hundred thousand years old emotion, but also an interpretation. The latter implies that our concept of love depends upon historical contingent norms, values, etc.11 Therefore the frame conditions of culture determine the feeling “Love” at least in part, the concept of romantic love in the 20th century is not the concept of love in ancient Greek; as time changes love gets new invented, even if there is a basic emotion.12 The interpretational change also changes our behavior and our expectations to a love attachment. In the next section we take a closer look at the romantic love or romantic utopia, which was developed in the 19th century, but is still influential today.
2.2 The Romantic Utopia
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already.”13
(Karl Marx)
Discussing love means even today to talk about the ideal of romantic love, as it is hawked in the mass media since long time. This is not a well-defined, but diffuse concept which was developed in the 18th and 19th century alongside Modernism, the transition from the old to the new world. The old world was: religion, community and stability. The new world brought stunning changes, secularization, break-up of community ties, a growing demand for equality and the uncertainty of identity.14 The development of romantic love can be understood as a subversive force against the existing moral codes and endogamy in the bourgeoisie society.15
For the marriage the couple’s feelings were not decisive, it was assumed that they develop afterwards, more important was rational calculus because marriage was the most important economic decision for most of the people in their entire life.16 As an example the whole property of the bride changed over to the bridegroom.17 Therefore relationships were not a thing of personal but of social and economic interests and were arranged.18 Endogamy ruled so there was no social mobility.19 The ideal marriage was one in which “the fortunes of both partners were perfectly equilibrated: the ideal marriage was an equitable bargaining”20. For love-making the man was ritually invited to the woman’s family; the inspection of his social adequacy was in public in front of the family.21
This background was the culture medium for the idea of romantic love which was developed as a transgressive utopia in love novels. The romantic love was invented as something running contrary to the traditional strategies of socio-economic reproduction, not the social class but love should decide about partnership. It stood for values as disinterestedness and irrationality; it ranked love as the supreme value. Moreover it demanded the sovereignty of the individual vis-à-vis social ties (like endogamy). Illouz (2007) argues with recourse to Durkheim that at the heart of romantic love were “deep affinities with the experience of the sacred”22. Despite the process of secularization, Durkheim claims, sacred experiences did not disappear but migrated from religion to other domains of culture, like romantic love.23 This utopian dimension derives from what Turner calls “liminality”, which means a category of ritual that inverts the regular hierarchies and liberates communal energies.24 The “liminal” explores the limits of the permissible and ritually sanctioned by the group. According to Illouz this is what the romantic utopia does: “it reenacts symbolically rituals of opposition to the social order through inversion of hierarchies and affirms the supremacy of the individual”25. The romantic love gives the promise to escape from the cold-hearted, rational world in the Victorian age and thereby pure luck itself and to give back the transcendental meaning of life that was gone through secularization.26
In fact, the romantic utopia was more an imagination in literature then a real phenomenon.27 The idea went through novels to the readers and changed their concept of love, so that the idea of the romantic utopia is today’s common knowledge.28 We acquired a definition of love and saw its social construction. How is this related and influenced by capitalism? How does it itself influence capitalism? In the next section we introduce capitalism. Distinctive elements with recourse to Marx’ description of the mode of production and the commodity fetishism are described.29 Afterwards this is set into connection with the romantic utopia shortly, before we begin to analyze the reciprocal interaction.
3 Capitalism and Love
3.1 Comparison of Capitalism and the Romantic Utopia
“Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the worker.”30
(Karl Marx )
In Capitalism capitalists try to increase their rate of surplus value. This can be done on the one hand by increasing the absolute surplus value by extending the working hours or intensifying work; on the other hand, and especially because there are natural borders for the production of absolute surplus value, by increasing the relative surplus value through an increase in productivity. The motive for this is fear because of the coercive laws of competition that are inherent to the system. If you do not increase your profits and reinvest your capital for innovations and/or more productive production facilities, your competitors will do that and crowd you out of the market by setting lower prices. This leads to the workers’ real subsumption under the mode of production. This means that the production is not geared to the worker (or the nature etc.), but just to the increase of surplus value. It is no more the worker who uses the machine, but the machine uses the worker, it determines the working hours, makes him since Fordism to a simple attachment of the process etc. The capitalist mode of production is characterized with indifference to the worker; he is just a mean of production. Due to the subsumption under the mode of production the worker is replaceable without big afford.
At the end of the value-form analysis of commodities Marx denotes the commodity fetishism that denotes that human relations of production (who makes what, who works for whom, commodity production time, etc.) are perceived as economic relations among objects. It looks like the commodities are themselves the medium of value; but this is a fetish, because the value is determined by the abstract work. In capitalism the value of a commodity comes into existing not before it is traded, in the act of trade it is equalized with another commodity (which can be money) and this determines its value. Exemplary, if you produce chairs you do not know whether your investments and work will be paid until your chair is really traded. Analogous to the commodity market there is a labor market on which the workers have to sell their labor (like a commodity). Hence workers seem to have different values. Additionally there putative value is not determined before they offer their labor; all their efforts in education etc. can be useless, if no one requests them. Then they have no value.31
It is easy to see that in common sense romantic love is thought as a contradiction of capitalism, it even denies the social world. The beloved is under no circumstances replaceable, but unique. The Alter is not a mean, but an end in itself: “love is the most important thing in the world, to which all other considerations, particularly material ones, should be sacrificed”32. This also implies that he/she is invaluable, rather than potentially without value. In capitalism two parties trade because of their self-interest to maximize utility while in romantic love individuals are bound together by selflessness. The point is clear: In your ordinary life your value is continuously put into question because of your replaceability (from this a general uncertainty arises), you have to compete with others and look for your self-interest and you are used as a mean. The predicates of the romantic utopia are in all these cases contrary.
Do we have to conclude that capitalism and love are different spheres? This would be overhasty. Engels (1884) criticized the romantic love as cornerstone of capitalism because it is the basis for reproduction of the work-force by subordinating the women to their men.33 From this perspective it is reasonable to claim that romantic love satisfies the people by acting as a counterbalance to the capitalistic system and therefore plays a functional role for capitalism. Instead of discussing this it is more fruitful to analyze how love and capitalism interact with each other. The thesis is that Polanyi’s great transformation is also applicable to the concept and practice of love. Great transformation means that capitalism freed up economic activities from moral and normative chains, that the economy was converted to self-regulating markets and that capitalism subordinated society to economy.34 As we will see this fits astonishing well to the development of love practices. If this is true the idea that love and capitalism are different or even opposite systems is illusionary. The process of economization of love took a long time, actually there are two phases. The first starts with the end of the 19th century: The romantic utopia was lived through consumption and commodities themselves got romanticized. We will see that romantic activities include liminal rituals that contrast the sphere of capitalistic production but which are finally based on capitalistic markets.
3.2 Consumption of the Romantic Utopia and Romantizisation of Commodities
3.2.1 Romantizisation of Commodities
With the turn of the millennium an influential change happened: the mass media arise. Cinema movies were often about romantic love which spread the idea from novels to the mass and visualized the utopia and thereby manifested it.35 Furthermore movies and advertisements were used to attach a romantic aura to commodities, to make them adorable and dreamlike, to shift the romantic desires to goods.36 This was accompanied by the development of mass-consumption markets and very important the growing of per capita incomes; as a result the expenditures for leisure activities rose.37 The advertisements showed couples in combination with simple products of daily life like cornflakes, bread or fridges. Especially the use of nature as romantic decoration was very popular because the nature is a symbolic location in which all references to social, economic or familiar roles are hided and the emotions can be expressed in their purest form. Paradoxical is that the advertising industry uses the nature to propagate consumption, while the advertisement itself denies implicitly that kind of world, that enables consumption. Later and also today, especially three types of products were advertised under the use of romantic pictures: Cultivation of one’s image (perfume, clothes, make-up), leisure time (hotels, holidays, drinks) and presents (jewelry). By advertising in this way the feelings are addressed because the intimacy coalescences with the product and suggests that you have to buy this product to be able to experience such moments. The product shall increase your attraction. Most of the advertisements isolate the couple from the society and put them thereby out of daily life. All in all this can be termed as romantizisation of commodities. The act of consumption is transfigured into a relation between lovers. But it was not just a process of romantizisation of commodities, simultaneously and also due to the romantic advertisements the practice of romantic moments were coupled to acts of consumption: the consumption of the romantic utopia.
3.2.2 Consuming the Romantic Utopia
Together with the increase in cinemas more and more dance halls and other places for leisure time were built and the proceeding individualism combined with mass culture was remarkable.38 The social change can be seen considering courtship. These traditional at the family’s home residing partner-choice rituals died out until the 1930s. With the building of places of leisure it became common to meet each other in public, and the practice of “dating” came into existence. This new ritual was (and is still today) directly coupled with consumption. You date someone and go to the cinema, café, dance hall, restaurant etc., this kind of practice became common which resulted in the fact, that the “cultivation of romance was not cheap”39. In order to spend some time together in private, independent from the family, the people met in public places connected with consumption, like the actors in the movies do. By doing this the couples are isolated from the environment and can enjoy romantic moments together, far away from work or everyday life. Due to the change in production the upcoming Fordism made it possible that cars were also affordable for the middle class. Hence, also the car played an important role for romantic practices; it allowed not just to isolate from everyday life, but also to drive away from it. The tourism is still today a basic element for the social construction of love.
This shows us that the liberation of love from family and social ties resulted in an enmeshment with acts of consumption: with acts of direct consumption as when you go to the cinema, or with latent acts of consumption as when you go to holidays. Even if you just drive into nature, where no direct consumption is involved, you are dependent on economic requirements to do this. The practice of romantic love matched perfectly to the interests of enterprises and the capitalists in general. Furthermore these processes drew a negative picture of marriage. The motive of marriage was detached by the “kick of love attachment”. Until the 20th century the marriage was an exchange between two persons or families, but now the consuming of romance in leisure time was no more an exchange, but a common participation in consumption of market-based goods. More exactly, the romantic moment even just exists in moments of consumption.
[...]
1 Marx 1867, p. 9.
2 Precht 2010, p. 19.
3 Precht 2010, p. 179 f.
4 Precht 2010, p. 185.
5 Precht 2010, p. 187.
6 Precht 2010, p. 185.
7 Illouz 2007, p. 223.
8 Schachter / Singer 1969, p. 379ff.
9 Sartre 1977, p. 51.
10 Precht 2010, p. 192 f.
11 Illouz 2007, p. 27.
12 Sommerfeld-Lethen 2008, p. 54.
13 Marx 1852, p. 9.
14 Illouz 2011, p. 19 f.
15 Illouz 2007, p. 35.
16 Illouz 2011, p. 66 f.
17 Illouz 2011, p. 66 f.
18 Fromm 1956, p. 11.
19 Precht 2010, p. 267f.
20 Zeldin 1973, quoted after Illouz 2007, p. 36.
21 Illouz 2011, p. 70.
22 Illouz 2007, p. 34.
23 Illouz 2007, p. 34.
24 Illouz 2007, p. 38.
25 Illouz 2007, p. 38.
26 Honneth 2007, p. 9.
27 Precht 2010, p. 271.
28 Fromm 1956, p. 11.
29 The section follows Marx 1867.
30 Marx 1867, p. 638.
31 Fromm 1956, p. 98.
32 Stone 1977, quoted after Illou 2007, p. 26.
33 Engels 1884.
34 Illouz 2011, p. 81.
35 Illouz 2007, p. 39.
36 Illouz 2007, p. 39.
37 Illouz 2007, p. 54.
38 Wucherpfennig 1995, p. 191 f.
39 May 1980 cited after Illouz 2007, p. 90.