Approaches to romantic love in early Marxist tradition

Peer review Andrea Pető. Ta pati knyga išleista ir vengrų k. : Szerelem és politika. ISBN 978-615-80161-1-7The critical Marxism of Lukács largely relied on the works of Luxemburg and developed a critique ofthe objectification and reification offeelings and emotions. It is the part ofcontemporary Marxist philosophical anthropology and Critical Theory’s philosophical anthropology (J. Butler, A. Honneth). The reification and instrumentalisation of love, family relationships and sex became a defining moment for the current state of individualism and consumption. I am not even ready to use the word “society” because it entails a strong presence of communities, groups or circles of friends. Alienation, objectification of love and the instrumentalism of sex destroy love relationships in factories and manufactories, in universities and institutions. The absence of skills and attitudes, the language of romantic love provides only domestic forms of desire and egoistic individual relationships. On the contrary, openness to socialized romantic love, the development of society’s emotional skills help to accept institutional creative spontaneity, power of praxis and poesies which were described in the work of another socialist and anarchistsyndicalist: Cornelius Castoriadis (1987). I found social dialectics of romantic love and spontaneity extremely important for the development not only of family relationships, not only as the practice of overcoming reification, but first of all as an emotional and moral development of communities and society. Social romantic love engages lovers into circles of common grand ideas and everyday life, into cultures; therefore histories, ideologies, organizations. Contemporary spontaneous organizational activism presupposes many possibilities: intervention into the cultures of Others (class, gender, religious, subcultural), negotiation, production of alternatives, but also the building of new friendship circles, networks oftrust and romantic love relationships.[...]Vytauto Didžiojo universiteta